An Ending
by Gavrilo-Princip
Summary: It's all over. You are the love of my life and we wade through the ash together. 6th chapter now posted!
1. Chapter 1

_Note: This story basically came out of nowhere. I wanted to write an unconventional pairing because I am tired of convention. I wanted to break free from the usual settings and themes overused in what's been written already. That's not to insult what has been written, I'm just bored with the usual stuff. I opened up Word and after deciding on a pairing, I had to decide on a story. Comedy and puff pieces have been done. This is something else entirely and it all poured out over the course of a few hours. I hope you like it and appreciate the unconventional pairing and the considerable change of scenery. I am very interested in what reviews will have to say. If you looking for a happy JAM story, you might want to turn back now. For those intrigued enough to continue..._

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The car died and coasted to a stop in a motel parking lot on the far side of Des Moines. They couldn't go around the city because they would lose too much daylight and so they made a final, desperate push straight through the city, swerving around abandoned cars sitting atop crumbling tires, their windows spider webbed and the blown out glass glittering in the last fading light from the west. She sighed when they finally rolled to a stop and Jim put the car in park and needlessly removed the keys.

"It was nice while it lasted," she remarked. They had found the car a week ago in a locked storage unit in the back row of a complex of them on the outskirts of Dayton, Ohio. After walking across almost two states, it was a welcome switch.

"Yeah. I'm sorry, Erin," he said. He knew it wasn't his fault, but Jim was sorry anyway, now that they had to resume walking. He scratched his beard and checked their backtrack through the review mirror. Nothing behind them except the distant city and a dark smudge of smoke spreading overtop of it. Camp fires and God knew what else. She reached a hand across the center console and slid her warm fingers through his where they lay in his lap.

"It's not your fault. Besides, nothing wrong with a little exercise," she smiled. After all of this, she still smiled and it still made his breath catch in his chest. He found himself smiling back and with his other hand, he squeezed her wrist lightly. They didn't need exercise. Both of them were getting to be too thin.

"Okay. We should probably get the car out of view. I'll push."

He opened the door and stood in the glare of the setting sun, pulling his sunglasses down over his eyes. Jim spat into the dust and stood looking around, the .45 he clutched hanging at his side, hammer cocked and safety off. He walked out into the road and looked first behind them, then ahead. Running parallel to them, three quarters of a mile away, was Interstate 80. Most of the road gangs and highwaymen still traveled main roads, if they traveled at all. These days, gas was hard to find and getting harder. Turning to face the hotel, his eyes traveled slowly over the front of it, starting at the little office on the far left and down the whole length. Only two of the six doors had been kicked in. None of the windows, save the big plate glass ones in the lobby, were knocked out. Cracked, sure, but not knocked out. The motel wasn't visible from 80, so it had been left essentially untouched. They would be fine for the night. Still, the car should be hidden.

After setting the safety and tucking the pistol down the front of his jeans, Jim placed his hands on the trunk and got down low and slowly the car started to roll. Erin steered it around back and out of sight. On the backside of the hotel, there were an additional six rooms. After she had put it in park, Jim leaned against the bumper, sweating and catching his breath. She popped the trunk and got out.

He stood watching as she leaned into the passenger window and retrieved the shotgun and a nylon bandoleer of shells. She jacked the pump back a half inch and made sure it was loaded and set it on the roof as she snapped the bandoleer around her waist. It hung low on her hips. Her hand closed around the pistol grip of the scattergun and she stood looking at him. That glimmer in her eye that he fell in love with what seemed like years ago hadn't died yet. Her lips turned up into a small smile and with her free hand, she brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes. Jim was starting to believe that that glimmer would never, ever die. He closed the distance in three strides and put his arms around her and kissed her, long and gently, for a few moments. They parted and he went back to the trunk and lifted the lid and brought out one of the rifles. Jim ejected the magazine and checked its load, then pulled back the charging handle to see if a round was chambered. The dust cover clicked open on its spring when the bolt moved and he saw the dull, brass glint of a round in the chamber. He replaced the magazine and, tucking the stock of the weapon tightly into his shoulder, turned towards Erin.

"I'll check the front rooms, you check back here?"

"Sure. But let's go to the office first and look for keys. I'm not a big strong Jim, so I can't kick doors open," she said. He smirked as he followed her around the side of the building. They hugged the wall and stopped when they reached the corner. Erin clicked the safety of the shotgun off and Jim did the same with his rifle. A slight nod of her head told him to go first. He rolled his eyes at her and as he passed, she elbowed him gently in the ribs. Jim successfully fought the playful urge to retaliate and stepped up to the corner, taking a few deep breaths.

Quickly and quietly, bringing the rifle into a ready position, he stepped around the corner and stopped, knees bent, eyes scanning in front of him. Jim forced two quick bursts of breath through his teeth, a quiet "tsst-tsst" signaling her to move. A half second later, she stepped behind him, covering their rear. She stepped closer until they were almost back to back and when he felt her hand touch his ass quickly and then retreat, he began to move forward toward the office. They moved fluidly, in tune with each other's positions and movements and reaction times. They knew each other inside and out and they had done this many, many times before.

Stepping over the threshold of the blown out window, they entered the office, the glass crunching beneath their boots. Less than a minute and the small lobby and the two tiny rooms behind the back desk were cleared. Jim stood with the rifle half lowered in the lobby and stared out into the setting sunlight, watching for movement. A moment later and Erin was at his side, shotgun tucked underneath one arm as she divided the keys up.

"Here are yours. Are we going to stay in the front or the back?" He took the keys from her and put them in the side pocket of his jacket, the weathered, dark green canvas rustling softly as he thought.

"We better stay up front so we can watch the road. Better safe than sorry, right?" He never made any decisions for them on his own. Erin always had a say and if she didn't agree, they thought of another way.

"That's what I was thinking. Don't want any zombies sneaking up on us," she joked. He played along.

"Pretty sure we've been over this: this is not that kind of apocalypse. We haven't seen a zombie yet and soon we'll be halfway across the country," he teased. She tsked him.

"The absence of evidence is not the evidences of absence," She said in singsong, bobbing her head as she did so. He smiled and nudged her.

"Alright, alright…zombies are still a maybe. Let's get the rooms cleared and get inside before it gets too dark. And I don't need to say it…" he trailed off, waiting.

"But I like when you do," she said.

"…but just keep doing it the way we do it. It works and we're superstars at it," he finished. Erin stood on her tiptoes and pecked his cheek.

"That's my boy! Love you."

"Love you, too." They were less on edge as they parted ways, but they were still alert, still primed for the unknown and the unknowable. Everyone still left standing in the world learned pretty fast the benefits of being careful and alert. With so very many who hadn't learned the important stuff returning to the loam, it was lethal not to learn quickly.

Jim stopped halfway to the first room and took off his boots, as he knew Erin would have also done. When he was down to his filthy socks, he moved silently forward. With his back pressed against the wall and the rifle again tucked into his shoulder, he reached out slowly and tested the door knob. When it didn't give, he slowly and quietly removed the appropriate key from his pocket and inserted it into the knob. After testing to get the proper turning direction, he kept his left hand gently on the key and slid his right index finger into the trigger guard of the rifle until it rested on the trigger. Jim took a deep breath and in a fluid motion, turned the key and the knob, pushed the door open and whirled and crouched low in the door frame, rifle pointed into the dimness of the room. His left hand, elbow braced on his knee, clutched the forward grip of the rifle and his right leg was pushed out to the side, balancing himself. A practiced position to go along with a practiced motion.

He pushed off and moved into the darkness and quickly cleared the bathroom, then moved on down the line of rooms.

* * *

When he was done, he retrieved his boots and met up with Erin by their now useless car. All of the rooms were empty. With that out of the way, the next topic was what, if anything, the other had found. The beds were all still neatly made, so they weren't short blankets or pillows. Erin set the shotgun on the hood of the car and stepped forward, bouncing excitedly on the balls of her feet.

"I found soap! And shampoo! Look," she held in her cupped hands four small, flat bars of soap and four tiny bottles of shampoo. She leaned in and, kissing him hard, put them in the pockets of his coat. Jim kissed her back, brushing her greasy hair behind her ears with both hands, the rifle now abandoned next to her shotgun. As they kissed, the pistols tucked into the front of their jeans pressed together and, reminded of the work left to be done, they reluctantly parted.

"Now if we can just find some water, we can banish the Grease Queen," Jim teased. Erin made a face and then raised her nose in the air, indignant. He picked up the shotgun and rifle and, with effort, tucked them under one arm and then went back to the trunk. With his free hand, he closed a fist around the drag handles of the two heavy ballistic vests, laden with rifle magazines. Erin picked up their second rifle and the lighter of the two hiking packs. They went around front and picked out a room and set the gear on one of the double beds.

Leaving her to unpack what they would need for the night, Jim went back to the trunk and awkwardly shouldered both the remaining hiking pack and a smaller backpack and picked up the case of bottled water. On top of this, he balanced a cardboard box with extra cans of food. The food and the water had been scavenged from an empty farmhouse they came across just after they had finished speeding through Des Moines. He deposited this in the room, where Erin was shaking the dust out of the comforter and sheets of the other bed, and went back to the car and got their assorted roadmaps from the center console. Tucking them into his back pocket, he went from room to room, stripping the beds of blankets and closing and locking the doors as he left. He brought the whole wadded mess into their new room, where a candle was now flickering in the darkness. They would need the blankets tonight. By his estimation, it was sometime around the middle of November and without any lights or heating in the entire country, the nights were long and freezing.

"I'm going to go check the office to see if there's anything we can use. Want to come?" Erin asked brightly.

"Sure," he said, turning to her from where he was inspecting the dark, thick motel curtains. She pulled her pistol from the front of her jeans on her way out the door and he picked up the twelve gauge and followed her.

She was, in a way, his leader, his boss. Not in the usual sense; they were a partnership, but she was now his world in its entirety. He lived every day for her and awoke beside her in the half-light of morning and knew that if, God forbid, he ever lost her, he would have no reason to go on, no other reason to keep himself alive or to continue on toward their final destination, toward California. In this sense, she dictated his actions without ever even knowing it.

Months ago, one night while talking about the things they had lost personally and that everyone had lost, collectively, she commented that she had never been to California and would likely never see the Pacific Ocean. The sadness and resignation in her voice stirred something inside of him and the next day, after laying beside her in the darkness unable to sleep, he suggested that they should go. She was simultaneously incredulous and giddy and hugged him so tightly he couldn't breathe. He knew then that if he ever lost her, he would put one of their guns in his mouth and follow her into the darkness. She'd do the same for him. It was unspoken between them.

In the office, in one of the back rooms, they found two empty water cooler jugs, big and blue and as dry as the layer of dust that coated them. Erin pouted, but in the other room, in a desk drawer beneath a pile of trash, they found a Hershey bar and a bottle with a good two inches of whiskey left. Kicking through a pile of trash in the corner, Jim discovered a packet of cigarettes, still sealed, and a pack of AA batteries. He put all of their treasures into his pockets and picked up the two empty water jugs. Erin shot him a questioning glance, but he just raised his eyebrows, smirked, and said nothing. Shaking her head, she rifled through the papers on and around the front desk and, after a few moments of searching, came up with a disposable lighter, half filled with fluid. They went back to their room.

While she readied the cooking gear, he stood in the bathroom, staring at the small bath tub. After a long time, he walked out into the candle light of the other room and grabbed the two plastic jugs.

"Are you going to play me a song? Are you in a jug band now?" When she smiled, she had dimples which raised her cheeks which in turn made her premature crow's feet crinkle and become even more noticeable. He thought that he had never seen anyone more beautiful in his entire life.

"Behind the dumpsters out back, the parking lot slopes down. There might be a ditch with some water for that fancy new shampoo you've got," he said, checking the chamber of his pistol.

"Ooh, be still my heart!" she pressed a hand to her chest and fluttered her eyelashes at him. Shaking his head in amusement, he walked out into the darkness and, after letting his eyes adjust to the moonlight that peeked through the clouds, made his way back behind the motel, to the dumpsters.

There was indeed a ditch at the end of the lot, but it had soaked up the recent rains and morning frosts and had been transformed into a pit of thick, dark mud. Jim bit his lip and thought. Finally, with one foot in the grass and one foot on the pavement, he paced the length of the lot. When he reached the far corner, he stopped and squinted, peering through the moonlight into the trees. When he turned around, he spotted a dirty, white five gallon bucket against the side of the hotel, underneath a downspout. He had missed it in the daylight because it was tucked into a corner near the office and had been partially concealed by some pieces of aluminum siding that had blown in from who knew where. He saw it now and moved quickly. He saw it was filled almost to the brim with water that was starting to ice over slightly at the edges. Jim kneeled and set the blue jugs to the side and palmed the film from the top of the water. Once it was cleared away, he grabbed the pieces of aluminum siding with one hand and the bucket handle with the other and went back to Erin.

* * *

Erin sat on the bed and alternated between looking at the brimming bucket sitting next to a stack of firewood they had collected and watching Jim work. He used a knife to pry off the grate of a heating vent near the floor and then set it aside. Next, he bent and stomped the aluminum siding pieces so he had a rough bib to ferry smoke from the fire into the ductwork and more or less out of their room. He put the bib into place after cutting away the carpet from the concrete floor in a 4 foot half circle around the vent and positioned the grate so it could be used for cooking.

He stood back and admired his work as Erin stood and gutted a spare pillow and together they used the stuffing and small twigs to prepare a cook fire. Once the fire was going, Jim made one last trip outside for two large rocks.

"What are those for?" Erin asked.

"For heating your bath water," he said, moving into the bathroom. She excitedly followed him as best she could, carefully carrying the bucket. Erin sat in rapt attention as Jim stopped up the tub and emptied the five gallons into the small tub. After every bit was emptied out, the water was about four or five inches deep.

"How are we going to heat it?" she asked. She loved watching him solve problems. After all they'd been through together, she still marveled at how his mind worked. As she watched, he grabbed a metal trashcan standing next to the sink and put the two heavy rocks inside and then sunk it into the tub. He exited and came back with wood and more of the pillow stuffing. After cracking the bathroom window, he started a fire in the trash can that would slowly warm her bath water.

They went back into the main room and, in the candlelight, cooked canned beans and Vienna sausages in small tin pots as the wood smoke hung heavily in the air. They sat side by side and sipped from bottles of water as the room warmed. Occasionally Jim would get up and stoke the fire in the bathroom and check the temperature of the water. When their food was steaming in the pots, they dug their spoons out of their packs and ate in silence. They each felt the warmth of the other pressed against them and neither felt the need to talk.

* * *

After dinner, Jim blew on the coals of the cook fire and coaxed it back to life and with the flickering flames casting dancing shadows on the walls, he cupped his hands and peeked out between the curtains into the moonlight. The road was empty and there wasn't a light for miles and miles around them. The world was dark and cold and largely empty, but they were warm inside the motel, with a small fire and full stomachs. He stepped away and made sure the curtains were closed, then dropped to the floor and stuffed two pillow cases into the crack underneath the door. He was pretty certain that no light was visible from outside. When that was done, he and Erin moved the heavy wooden dresser up against the door, leaning it at an angle and digging the legs deeply into the carpet to lock it in place as best they could.

They checked the bath water and found it to be almost steaming. Insisting that she could wait a little longer, Erin sat Jim on the edge of the bed and gently tipped his head back. With a pair of child's safety scissors, she trimmed his growth of beard and cut most of the shag out of his hair. She liked a little shag, so she left a little. The entire time, Jim's eyes were locked on her, watching her brow furrow slightly in concentration and her teeth worrying her bottom lip as she worked. When she was done, she stood gently stroking the sides of his face as they gazed at each other. After a while, they went into the bathroom and she stripped naked and carefully removed the trashcan from the tub and sat in the water.

He knelt at her side and together they laved hot water over her pale skin. Jim trailed his hand down her side, careful not to tickle her, and counted the ribs visible there. She was so skinny it made his eyes water and something catch in his throat and he had to clear it. He tilted her head back and pulled her hair out of the lose pony tail she wore it in. He smoothed the greasy strands and she closed her eyes and he carefully scooped handfuls of hot water through her hair, added shampoo from one of the little bottles, and then rinsed it out. Erin stood from the tub and dried herself with a towel. Jim undressed slowly and watched goose bumps spring up all over her body and her nipples harden from the cold as she started to shiver. She dressed in a different pair of relatively clean clothes as Jim sank into the water and they repeated the whole process with him.

* * *

They pushed their dirty clothes down into the soapy bathwater and kneaded and twisted the dirt out as best they could, wrung them out over the tub and hung them up to dry. Jim piled blankets onto the empty bed and Erin stoked the fire. They sat in front of the fire wrapped in a sheet and in the considerable warmth of the room, they split the Hershey bar and drank the whiskey and, though neither of them had smoked before the world had fallen apart, they smoked some of the cigarettes now, coughing and spluttering at first, simply because they might be the last people on Earth to ever smoke a manufactured cigarette. They finished the whiskey, which made them a little light headed, and he gave her the rest of his chocolate, which she ate slowly, with her eyes closed in concentration, memorizing the texture and taste of it, filing it away for later remembrance. When she was done, she wiped tears from the corners of her eyes and leaned her forehead against his and they sat there for a long time like that, holding onto each other with a desperate strength. They smoked a final cigarette, stripped, and climbed under the blankets.

Erin curled up into his arms, her body pressed against him and her warmth leeching into his skin. The rifles and the shotgun were within reach of both of them. She cried quietly every night. As tears tracked silently down her face, he would run his fingers through her hair and kiss her forehead and Jim would cry with her. Both of them were always overwhelmed with relief that they had made it through the day.

Each day was a struggle, yes, and some days were worse than others. Some days, they had to kill men together. Everything they did, it was always together. But at the end of the day, always, relief that it had passed and they were still breathing, still able to reach across and feel the other's warmth. They were still able to press their ears against the other's breast and hear the steady, hypnotic thrum of the heart that beat on, beneath the flesh and bone.

Every night, he would get her to stop crying by repeating a promise to her.

"You are my whole universe. I belong to you. If I go first, I'll wait for you there, on the other side of the dark waters. Be with me now. You are mine and I will kill anyone who touches you."

She always stopped crying. She always smiled at him and kissed him, slow and deep. Every night, she would sing to him before they fell asleep.

"You are my sunshine, my only sunshine. You make me happy when skies are gray. You'll never know, dear, how much I love you. Please don't take my sunshine away."

* * *

Post-script: I apologize for any errors in this writing, but it was all written in a blur in one sitting. Sorry for any mistakes. This has been inspired by Pat Frank's Alas, Babylon and Cormac McCarthy's The Road, two of the greatest books I have ever read. And, of course, by The Office.


	2. Chapter 2

_Note: Thanks to EmbassyBeets for the review and to StrawberryPajamas for favoriting the story. I've decided to continue because this next chapter came out so easily. I hope to get more reviews because I am still anxious for more feed back, good or bad. At any rate, I hope you like it._

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The dull, gray morning light glowed just past the drawn curtains. Jim opened his eyes slowly in the stillness of the room. The smell of burnt wood still hung faintly in the air and he shifted slightly so he could see the fireplace he made the night before. He moved slowly, careful not to wake Erin as she lay sleeping on his chest. Across the room, he could just make out the white piles of ash and blackened, cooling embers of their fire. A thin tendril of smoke streamed silently into the air. It wouldn't be too hard to relight the fire. He lay back down and ran his free hand, the hand that wasn't curled around her shoulders protectively, through Erin's clean hair. He never remembered motel shampoo smelling this good.

Jim guessed it was probably sometime around six thirty or seven in the morning, but he couldn't be sure. It had been a very, very long time since the batteries in his watch died and he had pitched it into the woods. The only time he was reasonably sure of was noon, when the sun was at the highest point in the sky. Even then, he was only sure on cloudless days. He thought of all of this in the morning stillness, the only sound the steady, deep breathing of the woman he held.

After a while, Erin began to stir and Jim stopped dozing when he felt her arms tighten around his chest, her fingers locked together just over his spine. Her body stiffened as she stretched, then she relaxed with a sigh into the fabric of his shirt. She lifted her head and kissed his chin.

"Good morning," she said, smiling. He kissed her.

"Morning. Sleep well?" he asked. They both had had circles under their eyes for the longest time, a product of little or no sleep, but the more time they spent without danger in their day to day lives, the more they seemed to fade.

"Mmm, yes," she mumbled, her voice still thick with sleep. She gave Jim a final squeeze and stood up, standing beside the bed in just her shirt and underwear and stretching again. Shivering, she pulled her clothes on while Jim pushed himself up out of the bed and did the same.

He moved over and started to coax the fire back to life as Erin sorted through the cardboard box holding their recently scavenged food. As Jim brushed away cold ash and embers, Erin set aside their breakfast and moved across the room to peek out the window. Skeins of smoke and ash drifted up from where he worked.

"It looks like it's going to be sunny today," she said, peering out into the bluish light of morning. Sunny days were just starting to make a comeback, almost three years after the Great Collapse. For those first years, however, the sun barely shone and most days were spent in perpetual twilight. It made for tough growing seasons, which frustrated Dwight to no end. But now it seemed that all of the ash and debris that clogged the sky, circulating and spreading through the upper atmosphere after cities all over the globe went up, was starting to settle and sunlight was making a welcome reappearance.

"A brisk fall day," Jim said absently, recalling a distant memory. Erin picked up on his wistful tone and turned away from the window.

"What are you thinking about?" she asked. He stopped tending the burgeoning flames and cleared his throat.

"Remember when we first moved in together?" he asked, waiting for a reply.

"It was the end of September, exactly one year after you called off your wedding," she answered with zero hesitation. What she didn't say was that this was when gas had climbed to six dollars a gallon and all the news talked about was the severance of all diplomatic contact with Iran, the issue of missing fissile materials, the new hard line government of North Korea, and the difficulties coalition troopers were having controlling insurgent forces in Pakistan and Syria. She vaguely recalled unpacking boxes with Jim in their new apartment, listening to the nightly news discuss the recent admission of a former Russian intelligence officer who admitted, on condition of anonymity, to being personally involved in the black market sales of low-yield nuclear weapons that were supposed to be decommissioned.

"Good job on the recall, Hannon. But yeah, remember how we had unpacked every day after work and on the weekends for like…a week straight getting everything exactly perfect? After that, do you remember what we did? The first day where our free time wasn't spent unpacking or buying stuff we needed for the apartment?" he asked, waiting to see just how good her recall was.

"Well, we spent most of that morning and early afternoon in bed," she said, raising her eyebrows slightly, "But after that, we went and had lunch on the courthouse lawn and then we bought kites and you tried to teach me to fly one, but mine kept crashing."

"It kept crashing because you tied the string to the wrong side and it flew all lopsided," he teased. She stuck her tongue out at him and they were both quiet for a moment, remembering the feeling of the lawn beneath their bare feet. Jim remembered looking at the displayed stone walls with all the quotes about government and justice carved into them and reading them out loud to Erin in an overly dramatic narrator's voice. Erin remembered knocking Jim down into the grass and trying to get him to smell her feet as he squirmed and tried to get away. They both smiled in the smoky dimness of the hotel room.

"What made you think of that?" Erin finally asked.

"It was around this time of year and I remember you getting out of bed at like one and you pulled open the curtains and said 'Oh, it's finally sunny out!'. Do you remember that?" he said, smiling. She nodded her head.

"I remember. It rained almost the entire week before," Erin answered. She knelt beside him by the fire and kissed him on the cheek. He leaned forward and kissed her neck and wrapped his arms around her. Erin leaned back and patted his shoulders.

"Okay, mister. I'm going to cook something and you should go check out Mister Sunshine," she said, standing. Jim followed her lead.

"Well, if you insist." He pulled on his boots and picked up one of the lightweight Kevlar vests they had discarded last night before bed and slipped into it. Jim picked up his pistol, tucked it into the front of his jeans, and with effort unblocked the door. He slowly opened the door and stepped out into the brightening day, pistol gripped in both hands as he moved forward carefully, turning in deliberate circles to check out the scenery around him.

Above him, the sky was a pale gray-blue and there were no clouds in the sky. It looked like Erin was right. To his left, toward Des Moines, there was still a pall of smoke hanging over the crumbling city. He walked across the parking lot and stood where the lot met the road and back the way they had come yesterday. For as far as the road stretched, it was clear and Jim saw nothing. He lowered the pistol slightly and turned to the right and his breathing stopped violently in his chest.

Two hundred yards down the road, he saw several shapes he was positive weren't there the day before. His eyes widened with panic and he dropped to his knee quickly, eyes and pistol tracking ahead and to the sides of the road for targets. He looked frantically back at the open door of the hotel room they had spent the night in and stood and ran as quietly as he could across the lot.

Erin looked up in alarm as Jim came rushing in, panting. He closed the door quickly and tossed the pistol onto the bed. He picked up the rifle with the scope and tossed it across to Erin, who caught it deftly and checked its load.

"What's wrong?" she whispered tersely, apprehension evident on her face as she flipped the covers off the ends of the deer scope Dwight had given them when they left the farm almost two months ago. He had slipped on the heavy ballistic vest with the ceramic armor plates over the Kevlar and was securing the straps and checking the pouches, counting the magazines there.

"There's something in the road that wasn't there before. It might be trash or something that blew in overnight, but I can't see it from here. I'm going to go take a look. I need you to cover me," he finished, breathlessly, already keyed up for the potential threat. With Erin on the scope, he knew he had probably the best cover he could possibly have. Jim himself was no good at the long range stuff, preferring close quarters, but Erin had responded immediately to Dwight's training and easily matched his expertise after their long sessions practicing. Erin nodded and pulled on her own vest, checking the straps and pouches as Jim had.

When they were ready, Jim moved to the door and pulled it open, scanning the trees directly across the road. Satisfied that there was nothing in the trees, he stepped out of the room four feet and swept right, left, right with the rifle, then dropped down and covered Erin. When Jim dropped to one knee, she moved forward out of the room, dropping to her stomach onto the sidewalk in front of the door. Once she was prone, with the rifle resting steadily on its magazine, she peered down the scope and scanned slowly up the road, bringing what Jim had seen into sight.

"Okay…it looks like there's a bag or something down there. Brown paper, I think; it's moving in the wind. There're some cans alongside it, I think they're empty. And there might be something behind the bag, but I can't see at this angle," she reported before dialing back the scope's power a bit so she could sweep the tree line and ditch.

"Anything in the trees?" Jim asked, his heart rate slowing as surprise and panic gave way to experience and control.

"Not that I can see," Erin responded, seeing Jim out of her left eye as she looked down the scope. She blinked quickly a few times to wet her eyes.

"Cover me," he said simply as he stood and began advancing forward, moving his upper body as little as possible so that his accuracy wouldn't suffer.

"Be careful, baby," Erin whispered. He glanced back and said 'I love you' and continued forward. She watched him briefly through the scope before sweeping slowly around him as he moved forward. A few beats later and he dropped down next to the brown bag. Erin breathed in and out deeply, evenly. Her heart hammered in her chest.

Jim gripped one of the bag's twine handles and pulled it upright. Glancing inside, he saw a jumble of trash and he upended the bag and spread the contents out before him. There was a tattered t-shirt and a broken metal fork, missing a few tines. More empty tin cans to match those in the road. Chickpeas and corn and potted meat, all empty. He touched the tins and tipped each of them over, confirming their lack of content. In the center of all of this rested half-charred logs and mounds of ash. No smoke trailed up from the dead camp fire, but when Jim spread out the ash and charcoal and felt the road, there was a lingering feeling of warmth. Mostly likely, they had taken off before dawn. His eyes searched the woods and field on either side of him, but he saw nothing. He stood and walked backwards back to Erin. They went back in the room and shut the door.

"Someone was here. Probably left before first light. The road was still warm from their fire. Bag was full of trash and the cans were all empty," he said, a hard edge in his voice.

"How did they not smell our fire?" Erin asked incredulously, her grip tightening on the rifle.

"Not a goddamn clue. You'd think there was no way that they couldn't, but they didn't even try to get in," he replied, head spinning as he tried to figure out the details. He shook his head to clear it.

"Okay, well...let's get something to eat and then we'll figure out our next move," Erin said calmly, shucking her vest. Jim nodded and together they heated two cans of fruit cocktail and warmed up the last of the flat bread they had made two weeks ago, after finding a half a bag of flour in a stripped bare grocery store. When they had finished eating, they sat sipping tea from the empty cocktail cans and stared at the dust blowing in the lot.

* * *

In the end, they both decided that to stay another night in the motel was not a good idea. They were reasonably sure that whoever had passed them in the night knew they were there and didn't want to risk them coming back and catching them asleep again. After they had split up and packed the bottles of water and the carton of food, they spread the maps out on the bed and pored over them, trying to find a stratagem that would provide them with the best safety and isolation they could get. Eventually, they settled on backtracking half a mile then cutting south on a road that would take them under Interstate 80. They would walk two miles past the interstate and then start moving west again. It was a lot of time and energy spent going in a direction other than their goal, but goals were no good if they didn't stay alive.

Just before noon, they put on their vests and shouldered their heavy packs and headed out into the brisk, fall air with their rifles held before them, two sets of eyes scanning both sides of the road.

* * *

"Do you think dogs are extinct now?" she asked. It was later in the day, a few hours after they had walked in silence beneath the interstate and had, after two and a half miles, started heading west again.

"No, I don't think so. I think there are actually probably a lot out there still. I mean, they might be a little wild now, but probably not extinct," he answered after thinking for a moment.

"That's what I figured. I mean, yeah, people probably ran out of food and decided to eat Yeller…" he looked and saw her make a disgusted face as she said this, "…but I'm sure not everyone did that. There's got to be some domesticated dogs still out there."

"Makes sense to me. Maybe we'll find one and we'll name him Dwight Junior," Jim joked. Erin giggled.

"What if it's a girl dog?" she asked.

"You always ask the hard questions. I guess we'd have to name her something else then, if you're going to be a hard ass about gender appropriate names," Jim said, eyes on the sky above him, which was starting to darken. Erin followed his gaze.

"Might not be so sunny after all," she said, frowning. Jim grunted in agreement, shifting the weight of his pack and with one hand adjusting his vest. He thought of the two vests they each wore and was glad for the encroaching chill. With a layer of Kevlar, a jacket, and heavy ceramic plates, moving around could quickly get unpleasant, but when the weather was colder, it actually made for good, live-saving insulation. The rapidly cooling, mid-afternoon air meant that they would be more comfortable walking, even if the vests did make them look like ridiculous, tactical marshmallow men.

* * *

The rain fell slowly at first, the cold droplets sliding down their faces and into their collars, but it was building in intensity. They walked on, eyes peeled and searching for someplace to stop for the duration of the storm. The brush at the side of the dirt road was so thick that they had to look carefully for a structure hidden in all of that mess or they would miss it, but they saw nothing.

Fifteen minutes after it had started raining, Erin stopped dead in her tracks, expression troubled. Jim stopped a few feet in front of her and turned back when he noticed she was no longer at his side.

"What? What is it?" he asked.

"Listen," she said simply, holding up a hand, eyes averted to the road as she concentrated. Jim waited and listened as best he could over the patter of the rain. He was just about to ask her again what she had heard when he heard it too, behind them and very faint. The alien buzzing of a two-stroke engine grew steadily. Erin's eyes flicked up to his.

"Come on! We have to get off the road!" he said loudly and they both broke into a trot, looking frantically along both sides of the road for some break in the brush, somewhere they could slip in and hide. They had gone maybe a hundred feet when Erin had grabbed his arm and slid them both to a stop.

"There's something back here! We can get through here!" she said, pulled him to the side of the road where the brush was less thick. He hesitated.

"Where?! I don't see anything," he said, scanning the tree line, looking for the structure she said she saw.

"Just follow me, for Christ's sake!" she shouted, panic in her voice. The engine wasn't more than half a mile behind them and closing quickly. He crashed through the brush with her and followed her, weaving around trees and stepping deftly over fallen logs. Vines clinging to trees with brown, dead leaves made it hard for Jim to see anything, but he eventually caught sight of an old overgrown barn maybe five hundred feet from the road, hidden by a thicket of hemlocks and dead branches. Erin slowed her approach, cautious, and Jim put a hand on her pack and urged her forward.

"Go, go! We've got to get inside now," he whispered urgently. The engine sound was closing fast. She led him around the side of the barn and they entered the musty dimness of its interior. Gray light crept in through spaces between the slats and they looked around at the stacks of dried hay bales, weapons half raised. Jim dropped his rifle and tore his pack off and helped Erin do the same. They carried them back into an old horse stall and set them in a corner and broke open a hay bale and hid the packs beneath the dusty straw. In the main floor of the barn, they found a rickety wooden ladder leading to the loft. Jim slung Erin's rifle over his shoulder and motioned her up the ladder, following her closely. He set the rifles down as Erin cleared a spot in the hay bales, working her way back to the loft's bay door. While Jim pulled the ladder up into the loft with them, Erin leaned precariously out of the door and gripped the handle, slowly pulling it shut, leaving a space through which they could just see the road they had been on minutes before.

They crouched behind hay bales and panted, catching their breath. Erin took up her rifle and rested it on the bales. Jim set his rifle next to hers and reached into his jacket pocket, pulling out the small spotting monocle. Together they peered through the rain and waited. Jim figured they were pretty well hidden from the road, the barn being framed by the green branches of the hemlocks, but he was tense all the same. At the very least if whoever was coming saw the barn and decided to investigate, they would get the drop on them. Within thirty seconds, the source of the noise came into sight.

* * *

A yellow dirt bike coasted into view, the engine belching smoke, and puttered to a silent stop. The two filthy, bearded figures riding it dismounted and stood in the road, coughing. Jim and Erin heard the murmur of conversation as the men gestured and spoke, but they couldn't make out the words. Their breathing became slow and synchronized as they watched the men.

Through the monocle, Jim could see the men in great detail. One wore a dirty baseball cap low over his eyes and across his back was a single barreled shotgun. The other carried a machete on his hip in a canvas sheath. Both wore heavy, dark brown coats covered in stains. On the right sleeves, fading slashes of red paint that might have been a tribal marking. The bike itself held an improvised saddle bag and lashed to the back was a jerry can that Jim assumed was full of fuel. The figures continued to talk, pacing in the dirt road, looking down and moving slowly as they did so. They started close to the bike and worked out in concentric circles. Erin must have had the same thought he did at the exact same moment.

"They're trying to track us," she whispered, an edge to her voice. He moved closer until their shoulders were just barely brushing and he felt her relax slightly. He said nothing as they continued watching the movements of the men for a few seconds longer. Through the trees, they saw them move closer to the side of the road near where they entered the woods.

"The rain probably washed our tracks clean, but if they step off the road, you have to shoot them. Can you get both?" Jim whispered. Erin clicked the safety of the rifle off and readjusted her grip.

"Yes," she replied. She began tracking the man closest to the woods, setting the crosshairs over his chest. In her head, she heard Dwight's voice: _A round to the chest is as good as one to the head. Center mass, right where his heart and lungs are._ _If you can put two down range before he drops, it's better to be redundant than to miss._ The rain drummed softly on the tin roof of the barn as the men came together by the side of the road and looked in through the thick trees and brush, craning their heads to see better. She readjusted her aim for the man carrying the gun. They made no move to enter into the tree line and instead moved back towards the bike.

"Decision time: do we let them go or do we shoot?" she asked. Jim thought for a second.

"The shots could let anyone else out there know where we are," he said, after a while. She nodded her head in agreement. They watched through the now driving rain as the men milled about by the bike for twenty minutes, sharing a pipe and still looking into the woods, though with less and less determination. After they finished their pipe and tapped it out on the bike's front tire, they remounted the bike and kicked the starter and in a belch of black smoke, the engine turned over and they went back the way they came.

In the hay loft, Jim and Erin let out their half-held breath and sagged against each other in relief as they listened to the fading engine. By the time the noise had completely faded, it was dusk. Jim put the ladder down to the floor and they climbed down and pushed open the barn door and stood outside. The rain had begun to falter and was now light, almost non-existent. They stood in the dripping forest looking at a badly overgrown trail leading from the mouth of the barn deeper into the woods. After considering it for a moment, they followed its curving path through the woods and came to a low stone wall at the edge of a clearing. They walked out into the waist high grass and together moved slowly to a rise in the field. As they reached the highest point, the rising moon broke through the cloud cover and bathed the area below them in its pale light, revealing another dirt road. This one was as overgrown as the trail back to the apparently unused barn and alongside it stood a very small house. Jim and Erin dropped down into the grass, just their eyes peeking over the dripping stalks.

"No candles in the windows," Jim whispered after a stretching moment of silence.

"With the moon, though, they'll see us pretty clear," Erin whispered back. They waited until the moon slipped back behind the clouds then moved forward down the hill towards the house, crouching low in the grass. They came alongside the house and tip toed slowly up to a window. Moving glacially, Jim peeked around the window frame and into the cottage. In the darkness, he could just make out a figure sitting in a chair five feet from the window. He froze, unsure whether or not the figure had seen him. The moon came back out again and in the brief window of light it provided before disappearing once more, he saw the figure was a dried, long dead corpse sitting in a recliner. The slender, desiccated fingers of its right hand held a small nickel plated revolver that reflected the last bit of the moon's light. He relaxed immediately and Erin saw this and moved around him to look in the window.

"Just a body," he whispered, "Want to check out the house?" Erin had better night vision than Jim and could see the dark spray of dried black blood on the wall behind the corpse's head. A chill went up her spine. She clutched his hand and dragged him away from the window.

"Tomorrow. Let's go back to the barn."

* * *

Together, they secured the barn doors by wrapping the handles shut with a pair of leather reins Erin found when they had uncovered their packs. They carried all of their gear up to the loft and brought up the ladder. Hay bales were rearranged to make sure they would be unseen from the barn floor. Jim swept the lose straw into a pile for them to sleep on and unpacked their blankets. They didn't have a fire out of paranoia of the men silently walking the road at night, searching for signs of their hiding, so they ate a cold dinner and drank water while they listened to the barn creak and groan in the November wind.

"I'll talk the first watch," he said to Erin as she screwed the cap back onto her half empty bottle of water. She looked at him.

"Are you sure?" she asked.

"Positive. You need your beauty sleep, Hannon," he replied, cracking a small smile. He sat on their bed of straw with his back propped against the bales walling them in. From his position, he had a perfect view outside to the road, visible in the periodic moonlight. Jim arranged his rifle so that it was propped on a bale facing out the loft bay door. He kicked off his boots and got as comfortable as he could. Dragging the blanket with her, Erin covered them both before she lay down with her head resting in her lap.

"I love you," she said softly.

"I love you, too. Always," he replied. He ran his fingers through her hair and within minutes, her breathing became rhythmic and she fell asleep.

Outside, the wind howled and the moon moved behind the clouds like an animal following the scent of blood.

* * *

_Thanks for reading this chapter! Please review!!_


	3. Chapter 3

_Note: Thanks to those who have viewed my story and another thanks to EmbassyBeets for remaining my only reviewer. Hopefully, as time goes by, more people will add their comments and critiques. _

_Embassy: You're right to call it the apocalypse, I guess. In this chapter, there's an explanation (sort of) of what happened. It's my belief that if/when any sort of Great Collapse happens, it won't be any one thing and instead a culmination of events both at home and abroad that contribute to a global collapse. To give you an idea of the main catalyst in this story, I took some knowledge/research/whatever you want to call it from the** Critical National Infrastructures Report** done by the **Committee to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse Attack. **You can view the report at .org._

_Everything else is based on conjecture and if anyone has any questions as to my thought processes, I'd be happy to discuss.  
_

_

* * *

_

They had switched places in the night and Erin woke him just after sunrise and they lay there together and looked out into the cold morning light. Through the slit in the mostly closed loft door, Erin and Jim watched the day brighten for an hour before they decided it was time to get up.

After pulling on their boots and the Kevlar vests, they picked up their weapons and walking out through the barn doors, yawning and stretching. The trees around them still dripped from last night's rain, the droplets falling onto the carpet of dead leaves beneath their boughs. Erin shuffled her feet in the semi-dry leaves and Jim smiled. She caught him looking at her.

"Don't look at me like that, you know I love the smell of autumn," she said and put the hand that wasn't carrying the shotgun on her hip, making a face.

"No, I know. I like it too," he said, reaching out and framing her face with his hand. His thumb brushed lazily against her cheek bone and her wide, brown eyes reflected the pale blue sky. Jim dropped his hand and together they walked the trail to the stone wall and stepped over it into the field. The tall, pale yellow grass rippled like waves as a slight breeze moved through it and they stood watching it for a few seconds before starting out across the field toward the house.

The front door was unlocked and Jim opened it with a sharp whine from the hinges. Cautiously, he stepped into the small living room and looked around. Everything had a thick layer of dust over it. His eyes roamed over a couch, a television set, a rack of DVDs, piles of books, small keepsakes. Erin came in behind him and ran a finger over the surface of the coffee table.

"I don't think I even need to point out that no one's been here in a while. No one except…him," she gestured in the general direction of the corpse they knew was sitting in the other room. Directly in front of them was a short staircase leading to the second floor. Jim walked up a few stairs until he could see above the landing. Two small bedrooms and a bathroom. He rejoined Erin in the living room and they walked past the stairs and into the small dining room where the corpse sat and continued through to the kitchen. Jim ran a finger over the cabinet doors and brushed the resulting smear of dust off onto his jacket. He and Erin walked back into the living room and stood looking at the body.

There was only the faintest odor of milk gone sour. The body had been there for a long time. Mummified flesh clung taught to bone and Jim stared at the Rorschach spatter of blood behind its head. _An apparent suicide_, the local papers would have read, if they were still being printed. He knelt by the body and pried the revolver from between the stiff fingers. There were five more .38 rounds in the cylinder and Jim pulled the single spent casing out and held it up to the light, between his thumb and forefinger, before flicking it to the carpet. He closed the cylinder and tucked the revolver into his pocket. Erin walked past him and out into the living room. He heard the front door close and she reappeared.

"You okay?" he asked. Finding suicides like this was a sobering experience for both of them. She looked at the body for a long time before answering.

"Yeah," she responded softly. She shook her head to clear it then moved back into the living room. He followed her. Erin brushed the dust off one of the couch's cushions and sat down, looking around the small room. Jim sank down next to her, not bothering to brush his spot off first. He leaned forward and picked up a few books from one of the piles around him and looked at the titles. A book of poetry, _How to Stay Alive in the Woods,_ and a military field manual about improvised explosives. He set the manual and the book of poetry on the coffee table and set the rest back onto the pile.

"This is a nice little place. Aside from the body, of course," Erin said, still taking in the room.

"It is. Would you want to stay here another night? If we got rid of the body, I mean," he asked. She bit her lip and thought for a moment.

"No, I don't think so. I'm not sure. We should look around, though. See what's lying around," she answered as she stood from the couch. Jim stood and took her rifle and set it with his alongside the recliner. Without another word, Erin shot him a forced smile and went into the kitchen, leaving Jim standing alone. He shook his head gently and climbed the stairs to the second floor.

The bathroom was decorated in light blue tile with a white floral pattern. The small space was dominated by an old fashioned porcelain bathtub, chipped in places, and a small linen closet. A toilet and a small sink stood opposite the bathtub and closet. Jim turned the knobs back and forth. No water spilled from the faucet. A medicine cabinet was set into the wall over the basin. Jim opened the mirrored door and looked inside. There was a full bottle of Advil, a disposable razor, and a wrapped bar of soap. He shook the bottle to remind himself what it sounded like. Everything went into his pockets. In the closet, Jim shifted around the unused towels and washcloths and turned out a single roll of toilet paper. He walked out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him, and moved on to the two small bedrooms.

* * *

In the end, he found two long candles, a box of .38 rounds, and two boxes of 12 gauge rounds. One of the bedrooms had belonged to a woman and on the dresser sat a squat wooden jewelry box. He lifted the lid and stared down at the gleaming jewelry. Jim pocketed a delicate silver chain and shut the lid. He was just about to walk out of the room to meet back up with Erin when he stopped. He lifted the lid again and sorted through the jewelry before picking up a small gold ring with some sort of blue stone set into it. Jim looked at it for a long time before slipping it into the pocket of his jeans.

Downstairs, Erin had found that most of the cabinets were bare. The last one she checked, however, held a small store of food and a can of coffee. Jim found her in the kitchen squeezing the cans and chewing her bottom lip.

"These feel okay. I don't think they're spoiled or anything. But we don't really have much room left to carry anything," she said, frowning. Jim stood and stared silently out the kitchen window, thinking.

"I think we should stay another night," he started, "We'll relax today and eat all that we can and in the morning, we'll leave. I don't really want to let the food go to waste and we wouldn't be using up our own stuff. What do you think?"

"What about the guys on the bike? What if they come back?" she asked with a very slight edge of worry in her voice.

"If they come back on the bike, we'll hear them long before we see them and this time we'll deal with them. But I don't think they'll come back. They lost us once and trying to find us just wastes more gas. I think we'll be okay," he answered. She nodded and they spent a few minutes discussing whether or not they would stay in the house or in the barn. During the discussion, Erin's eyes kept finding their way to the body propped in the chair.

"Do you think-" she started, only to be interrupted by Jim.

"We can bury him, definitely. And then you'll feel better about staying in the house overnight," Jim said, placing his hands on her shoulders. She smiled up at him and said nothing.

"What'd you find upstairs?" she asked.

"Bullets for the revolver, two candles, soap, a razor, Avil, and toilet paper. Oh, and I found something for you. Two somethings, actually." As he talked, he methodically emptied out the contents of his pockets, but at the mention of her gifts he backed away with his eyebrows raised. Erin set down the cans she was holding and pursued Jim as he backed out of the kitchen, through the dining room, and into the living room.

"What did you get me? Huh? Come on, Jim, don't keep secrets," she said as she swiped excitedly at his pockets. He caught her wrists as they came to a stop in the living room.

"Hang on there, Hannon." She calmed herself and stepped back, fidgeting as she waited. Jim pulled out the two boxes of 12 gauge shells and handed them to her. She smiled and opened the brown cardboard boxes.

"Oooh, buckshot. You know how to spoil a girl, Jim," she laughed. When she looked back up, Jim was dangling the silver piece of jewelry in front of her. Erin's eyes went wide when she saw the delicate chain spinning from his fingers, glittering in the mid-morning light. Wordlessly, she took it from his hands and held it carefully in hers.

"I saw it upstairs and I thought you'd like it. It's almost identical to the one you used to wear," Jim explained. Erin smiled up at him before handing him back the chain and turning her back to him. She swept her hair up away from her neck. Jim circled her neck with the chain and then fastened the clasp and set his hands on her shoulders. Erin leaned back into him and they both closed their eyes.

* * *

In the end, the ground was too hard to dig a grave. Jim and Erin tried together for a half hour with shovels they had found in the house's root cellar, but they were only down maybe six inches. After thinking on it for a while, Jim and Erin had carefully dragged the rocking chair and body outside into the grass to a slight ditch made right before the hill leveled off. As respectfully as they could, they peeled the dried body from the chair. They laid the body, still in its seated position, on a blanket in the grassy depression. Before they wrapped the blanket up completely, Erin stooped and delicately withdrew a set of keys from the front shirt pocket.

"I heard them when we pulled him out of the chair. Don't want to get locked out, do we?" Erin said in response to Jim's raised eyebrow.

"No, we sure don't," he replied. They wrapped the blanket tightly and cut down pine boughs and piled them on top of the wrapped corpse until all that was visible was a thick, green mound. They gathered firewood and went back into the house. There wasn't a fireplace, so Jim built the fire in the stainless steel sink in the kitchen and used the grate from the oven as a grill on which they could cook. They spent the day on the couch in the living room with the door propped open and breeze blowing through, eating what the house's former occupant didn't get a chance to eat and paging through his books lazily.

* * *

"_AFTER the torchlight red on sweaty faces _

_After the frosty silence in the gardens _

_After the agony in stony places _

_The shouting and the crying_

_Prison and place and reverberation _

_Of thunder of spring over distant mountains _

_He who was living is now dead _

_We who were living are now dying _

_With a little patience"_

Jim remembered reading the poem in high school as part of his senior year literature class and found the title to be appropriate. He shut the book he was reading and looked over at Erin. She was lying on the couch, hair burning auburn in the light from the open doorway, reading _To Kill a Mockingbird._ Jim couldn't think of anyone else he'd want to traverse this wasteland with. With his eyes, he traced her delicate features and filled inside with something akin to contentment.

"Have you ever read that before?" Jim asked to break the silence. She looked up and smiled.

"Once, in high school. A couple of times after that. Not for a while, though," she replied. She set the book down on the couch beside her and stretched, arching her back, before leaning forward and picking up her cup of coffee. Erin blew at the rim of the ceramic mug.

"I only read that one once, and only because it was assigned," Jim admitted. Erin made a dismayed face that Jim thought was only half faked.

"Well, that's no way to read a book. If you _have_ to read something and you don't have a choice, then you don't appreciate it. We'll bring it with us and you'll read it again and you'll probably like it more," she said with finality.

"So you're assigning me homework now?" he asked.

"I sure am and you'll get a failing grade if you don't do it," she grinned playfully. He smiled back, thinking of how domestic this was. It had been a long, long time since they had something like this. Once again, he was reminded of the time before all this and thought about the day it all fell down.

* * *

At 3:17 in the afternoon on a Wednesday, the lights went out and the computer screens crackled and died. All of their cell phones died simultaneously. Erin had picked up the phone and had heard nothing, not even a dial tone. Surprised bewilderment crept through everyone quickly. Michael came out of his office.

"Hey everybody! _Blackout Party!_" he cried. No one responded. With the domestic and international situations the way they were, periodic interruption of electricity nationwide was becoming a regular occurrence.

Two months prior, an unknown terrorist organization simultaneously released weaponized small pox into the subway systems of Los Angeles, Houston, and Chicago. The infection had spread so quickly and was so fatal that those cities had to be cordoned off by the National Guard. The casualty rate had been astronomical. Stanley's brother lived in Chicago; the last he heard from him was the day before they had closed off the city. Before that, Islamic extremists hijacked two full transatlantic flights before they left American airspace and crashed the planes in the 9/11 memorial, bringing the structure crashing down onto Lower Manhattan. As retaliation, "targets of retribution" were destroyed by the remaining Coalition forces in Syria. The troops in Pakistan had been fully withdrawn weeks prior because, as the government put it, the situation was "no longer tenable".

Throughout all of this, the stock market continued to plummet. Gas was eight dollars a gallon and the price of food soared accordingly. The shelves of grocery stores had stayed stocked, but the high prices drove all of the smaller stores out of business and even the larger chains had to reduce the number of open facilities. The Executive and Legislative branches of the government struggled to find solutions to the economic situation. Meanwhile, the international situation was just as bad.

A month prior to the lights in Scranton going out, Pakistan and India had severed all diplomatic ties with each other and the nuclear arsenals of both nations were on high alert and given operational readiness codes. The White House released a statement that they were essentially sitting this one out to focus on problems on the home front and on the same day, India pulled first and touched off a small scale nuclear exchange between the two nations. The death toll was somewhere around the ten million mark within two hours. Within the same week, a radiological bomb had detonated in London, prompting a mass evacuation. It was discovered that a radical English fascist movement set off the bomb in protest of the British government promising to send troops and aid to both India and Pakistan. Martial law was declared nationwide within twelve hours.

With all of that in the headlines, it was hard to find humor in Michael's typical behavior. While Michael tried to get the entire office in a blackout party spirit, Jim followed Dwight into the conference room and they scanned the skyline of Scranton. Jim spoke first.

"This doesn't feel right."

"No, it really doesn't," Dwight agreed. After a few seconds, they looked skyward and noticed the fading fireball, very high up in the sky, almost in the upper atmosphere. Jim felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach and Dwight yelled for everyone to get into the conference room. They all stood and watched as the second sun faded. Erin slid her fingers through Jim's and he felt Pam's eyes on them as they stood there, trying to make sense of what they had just seen.

"What the hell was that? A solar flare?" Oscar asked.

"A solar flare takes place on the sun, _idiot._ Not in our atmosphere," Dwight sneered.

"Okay, then, Dwight. What was it?" Oscar challenged. Dwight thought for a second and then asked everyone to grab their car keys and follow him into the parking lot.

All of their cars refused to start. No clicking of the starter, no desperate puttering, nothing. Only Dwight's older model car would turn over. All of the newer ones were completely useless. They stood around the parking lot, debating what to do. The sun was setting over Scranton and in an hour, it would be dark.

"I need to go check on Mose," Dwight said finally, heading to his car abruptly. Jim followed him.

"Do you know what's going on, man?" he asked. Dwight turned and looked behind him at the others, then spoke to Jim in a lowered voice.

"It's all gone, Jim. Cars, phones, lights, heat. I can't know for sure, but things are probably about to get very bad. Get Erin and go home and pack up. I'll pick you up in the morning," he replied.

"Wait, why?" Jim asked, confused. Dwight shook his head, irritated, then walked back to the group.

"Attention, everyone: I don't know if this is all temporary or not, but I hereby invite you all to come stay at Schrute Farms with me until this is all resolved," he announced.

"Why would we do that?" Stanley asked. Dwight told them all how unsafe living in a populated area might get without transportation, water, and electricity. As he got to the part about food shortages, Jim felt Erin press into his side to get his attention.

"What do you think?" she whispered. Jim didn't know what to think. He felt this nagging pull inside of him, telling him that everything he had seen on the news in the past year and a half and everything that happened today were all intimately related. He had a feeling that staying with Dwight, away from the city, would be the safest option.

"I don't know. I've got a bad feeling. What do you think?" Jim asked.

"I've got the same feeling. I go wherever you go," she replied. Jim briefly forgot about the situation and looked down at her and smiled. After a while, he heard someone clear their throat. They turned and looked and saw Pam looking uncomfortable.

"Hey, sorry to interrupt…I was just wondering if you guys are going to stay at Dwight's?" she asked, uncomfortably. Since they had broken up, Pam went from being upset to angry and then, for the longest time, settled on vicious hatred for Erin, but eventually that started to cause problems around the office and had to be settled. She was civil towards both of them now, but it was still extremely uncomfortable on both ends.

"Yeah, I think we are. He said something about picking us up tomorrow morning. It seems like the best idea," he answered. Erin was standing behind Jim and he didn't need to look at her to know she was bristling at Pam's presence. Erin didn't take Pam's anger and animosity very well. Jim thought it was because she was so nice and cheerful that when she was confronted with someone who disliked her passionately, she had no idea what to do because she had never encountered it before, at least not so openly.

"Yeah, I think I might go, too. Just for now until they restore power or whatever," Pam said quietly. Jim excused himself and walked over to where Dwight was still addressing the group.

"Hey, man, sorry to interrupt, but if you'll have us, Erin and I are in. What do you need from us?" he asked, quieting down the group with his announcement.

"Just be ready for pick up tomorrow morning. Bring any food you have and anything you think might be useful," Dwight answered, looking at the darkening sky.

"Okay, what time do you want us to be ready at?" Jim asked. They both looked at their watches before catching themselves. Wordlessly, they stripped off their useless watches and tossed them to the ground.

"Just be ready at first light," Dwight said. Erin came over and took Jim's hand and they went to their car to take what they needed before starting the walk home. Once they had everything gathered, Jim grabbed the tire iron as an afterthought and they began the long walk to their apartment.

By the time they made it home, it was full dark out. With no streetlights, the blackness of the night felt suffocating. Once inside, they lit candles and went about packing up clothing and food and anything else they thought would be useful. When they were done, they made a dinner out of everything perishable in their now useless refrigerator and ate it by candle light. They cleared the table and washed the dishes and moved all of their things to the front door. Jim opened the door and together they stood on the stoop in front of their apartment and looked up at the stars shining brilliantly in the night sky. Erin put her arm around him and they listened to the wind rustling the leaves in the absolute blackness of the night.

Suddenly, to the southeast, a bright light appeared in the darkness, starkly brilliant against the onyx sky. It brightened everything until it seemed as if it were early evening, rather than the middle of the night. A few seconds after the light stained the sky, a terrible thundering built in volume, shaking the houses up and down the block. Jim and Erin pressed their hands against their ears to block out the sound. After a moment, it began to fade, along with the light. In a few minutes, the sky was dark again.

"What the fuck was that?" Erin almost never swore. It wasn't in her nature. He could just make out her wide eyed fear in the darkness.

"I don't know, but that's the direction of New York City. Let's get back inside."

Once they were back in the apartment, they locked the door and drew the shades and carried the candles up into their bedroom. Jim found an old wind up alarm clock. Erin had a sixth sense when it came to guessing the time, so she worked from when the power went out and onward and they set the alarm and climbed naked in bed together. Twice, they were woken up by gunshots in the neighborhood. Jim thought they were within a few blocks of their place, but he couldn't be one hundred percent sure. He got up and lit a candle and pulled on jeans. Erin watched with drowsy eyes in the flickering light as Jim dug around in his closet, finally producing a shoe box.

"I forgot about this," he said, coming over and sitting on the bed next to her. He opened the lid and pulled a bundle wrapped in an old, oil-stained t-shirt. When he unwrapped it, they were looking at an old .45, four magazines, and a box of ammunition.

"It looks really old. Where'd you get it?" Erin asked. Jim set about clumsily loading the magazines.

"It was my grandfather's. He carried it in Europe during the war. It got passed on to me and it's been out of that shoe box only a handful of times," he replied.

"Well, I guess it's a good thing you have it, now that everything is so scary," she said quietly. Jim propped a pillow up behind him and half-leaned against the headboard, pulling Erin against his side. He wrapped an arm around her and she rested her head against his shoulder. He cocked the pistol's hammer and set it beside him on the blankets.

"Try and get some sleep, Erin," Jim said, sliding a hand slowly, soothingly through Erin's hair. She mumbled her assent and within moments she was asleep. Jim listened to the sound of her breathing and felt her breath, warm against his chest. He looked around the room one last time, then reached out and brought the candle in front of him and blew out the delicate flame, plunging the room into inky blackness.

There were more gunshots as the night wore on, but Erin continued to sleep fitfully. Jim didn't sleep at all and when the sun rose, they went downstairs and met Dwight. He was waiting outside their door with a shotgun, looking carefully up and down the street. The car was loaded and they were away from the city and on dirt roads before the morning fully broke.

* * *

After Jim had shaken himself from his thoughts, he and Erin had passed the rest of the day reading and talking before finally climbing the stairs to the second floor and sliding beneath the sheets of the biggest bed. The next morning, they woke and ate the last bit of food they had reserved for breakfast. They packed the small amount of remaining coffee, their newly appropriated gear, and several books into their hiking packs and policed the house one last time for anything of use, but turned up nothing. As they left the house, Erin turned around and locked the door, attaching the door key to the key ring that held their old apartment and car keys. Jim saw that she had already added the hotel key to her ring of souvenirs. She smiled up at him and shrugged, tucking the keys into a pouch on her vest. They checked the rifles and, as quietly as they could, walked through the field and into the woods, stopping in the thick brush lining the road and looking up and down its length. When they were satisfied that it was empty, they stepped onto the dirt road and continued the way they were headed before being driven from their path by the men on the dirt bike.

The sun rose behind a layer of clouds, the light of the morning like dishwater, and they walked on, quickly and quietly. From time to time, one of them would turn around and walk backwards to make sure no one was following them. They saw no one.

* * *

_The poem Jim read was **The Waste Land** by T.S. Eliot. And in case anyone's curious, Jim's grandfather (for the purposes of this story) was in WWII and carried a Colt 1911. I apologize for any spelling or grammatical errors. **PLEASE REVIEW!** Because I love getting notifications saying I have reviews waiting on my stories. Thanks for reading._


	4. Chapter 4

_Note: Thanks to everyone who viewed this story. Please review! I'd also like to thank EmbassyBeets for sticking with the story and Old Crow for reviewing. I apologize for the delay in this chapter, but I had to make sure the wording was just right (should result in less grammatical and spelling errors) AND the weather has been warm here lately, so I've spent a lot of time in the woods. At the end of this chapter, there will be some notes but since one of the notes has to deal with the very first paragraph, I'll put it here. During the Cold War, Offhut AFB was the center for the Strategic Air Command (currently US STRATCOMM) and was near Omaha, Nebraska. In all the government projections, Offhut AFB (due to strategic importance to the enemy) would have almost certainly received a direct, multi-megaton hit from the enemy. In present day, it still retains that critical importance. I hope you enjoy this chapter!_

* * *

They walked for weeks. As they went, the weather darkened and got colder with the oncoming winter. It had just started to snow with regularity, though with no substantial buildup, but it wouldn't be long before flurries gave way to snow storms. A few days prior, they passed by what was left of Omaha. Out of habit, they gave cities wide berths and in this case it proved provident. From a higher piece of roadway miles away, they could see that all that remained of Omaha was a large crater surrounded by a blackened wasteland of rubble and debris. Jim remembered that there was a large, Cold War-era air force base in Omaha that housed a large military command. He didn't think it was a coincidence that the city had taken such a direct hit from whomever. Unsure of radiation levels, even as far away as they were, they moved as quickly away from the Omaha wastes as they could.

Their food supply was low and they were always hungry. They had managed to scavenge enough to keep them going, but bad luck in the past few days led to them not finding much of anything. The few houses they passed that weren't burned down were all but empty. In this condition, they stopped outside a small town. They found a metal sign lying in the grass that read "Elwood, Nebraska". They checked their weapons and walked slowly westward into town.

The gray sky spit forth swirls of snow that whispered up and down the streets and between the ramshackle houses and caught in the dead brown grass of their overgrown lawns. After a few blocks, they came to the open door of the Elwood Public Library. They entered the gloom of the building, their feet kicking through the dead leaves that had blown in and carpeted the area near the door. Somewhere in the building, melt water dripped and echoed it's pitter-pat throughout the library. One shelf had been toppled and its books lay strewn about, but other than that, the rest of the mildewed stacks stood silently and oddly untouched. Erin picked up a wet and bloated magazine from a rack near the door.

"Oh, look at that: Brad and Angelina broke up," she said.

"Aw, I thought those crazy kids were going to make it for sure," Jim replied, stepping further into the library and tightening the grip on the rifle. Erin giggled and let the magazine drop to the floor. They moved further into the building and split up. Erin found a large bottle of water hidden in the bottom drawer of the librarian's large oak desk. After a while, she found Jim in the records department, leafing through papers until he finally came across a visitor's brochure. It was a ridiculous notion for such a small town to have such a thing, but it folded out into a map and listed restaurants and businesses and the like. He hoped the information was current. After some discussion, they decided to head to the Sherriff's department first since it was closer. After stashing their hiking packs in the drop ceiling of a back room, they exited the library and set off south, using the map to guide them the short distance. With the wind chill, it was so cold that their bones ached and their noses ran.

Halfway down the next block and three men stepped out into the road. Two wore scarves over their mouths and a third man wearing a dirty trucker's hat stood in the middle. All of them carried clubs made out of either pipe or axe handles. The man in the trucker's hat had a hunting knife clipped to his belt. His long, greasy black hair blew in the cold wind and their breath bloomed before them in white clouds. They stood in the road and hefted their bludgeons. Jim and Erin came to a stop almost twenty feet away.

"Hey there, little miss. Where y'all headed?" the man in the center spoke to Erin, ignoring Jim. Erin didn't answer.

"We're just passing through. Headed nowhere in particular," Jim said warily. None of the men looked at him as he spoke.

"I was talking to the girl," Trucker's hat said finally. Jim felt his heart rate speed up. He clicked off the safety and shouldered the rifle.

"You're done talking to her. Talk to me. And don't look at her," he said. He heard Erin quietly release the safety on the shotgun. The three men laughed. When he did so, the center man revealed blackened gums.

"It's a free country, what's left of it anyways, and I can talk to whoever I goddamn please. This here is our town and you all is trespassing," the man in the hat said, eyes sliding once more over to Erin. He was a shark that had tasted blood in the water, disconnected and primal in his urges.

"I said don't look at her," Jim raised his voice and his rifle, aiming for the man's head and taking three steps forward. Even though his partners seemed nervous, Trucker's hat laughed again.

"I don't even think that thing is loaded. There ain't been any ammo around in here God knows how long and I can't imagine you've got any. Don't know where all you'd find it. I think you're bluffing me here, mister," the man said, switching the club to his left hand and pulling the knife with his right hand.

"Maybe we were a little better prepared for this than you," Jim said, finger on the trigger.

"Maybe I'll come over there and slit your faggot throat," the man in the trucker's hat said. He took a step forward and then another and his friends followed him.

On his third step, the man's face exploded in a hot spray of blood and teeth. Jim looked at Erin who held the shotgun before her and she jacked the pump and sent a smoking shell spinning into the air. It fell to the pavement in a clattering sound of plastic and brass. Jim's ears rang. The other two men stopped dead and watched as their leader's body dropped gracelessly to the ground, ruined head gushing blood onto the cold pavement.

"Drop the clubs and put your hands up. Now!" Jim commanded, pointing the rifle steadily at the closest man and stepping forward. The two did as they were told and stood tensely in the road. Jim saw that the lead man had carried a small canvas satchel on his back and he asked Erin to cover him as he stooped and cut the straps and lifted the pack. Inside, a few tins of food and nothing much else. He stood and addressed the men.

"Keep walking until you're out of town. If I see you again, you're dead," Jim's voice was level, authoritative. He and Erin stood silently as the men slowly moved away, somehow mustering a swagger. When they were ten feet away, Jim heard the taller one speak.

"You'll see us again. Real soon. You too, sweetheart."

Jim fired the rifle once into the gray sky and told the men to stop. They froze, uncertainly, with their hands in the air, chests still puffed out, still full of bravado. They turned and face Jim. He closed the distance between them and stood before them with the rifle.

"I wish you didn't say that. On your knees."

"What?"

"I said get on your knees. I won't tell you again," Jim said. The men did as they were told and Erin moved off to the side, covering them with the twelve gauge. Not wanting to waste the larger ammunition of the .45, Jim pulled the small .38 revolver from his belt at the small of his back and checked the cylinder.

"What're you doing?" one of the men asked. Jim stepped forward.

"I'm sorry. But I can't have you coming after us. Neither of us is prepared to take that chance," Jim looked to Erin, asking an unspoken question. Her eyes were hard and her jaw was set. They'd had to do this before. She nodded.

"Hell, mister, we didn't mean nothing by it. Just blustering, is all," the shorter man said. Jim looked in his eyes and couldn't see any sincerity.

"Yeah, I'm sure. I'm not taking that chance. Sorry," he responded. He held the gun at his side and looked at the men.

"He ain't going to kill us," the smart ass who started all this said. Jim raised the barrel and pressed it between his eyes and cocked the hammer. The man didn't blink. Jim stepped back and the man started to smile smugly, but Jim swung his aim over to the other man and shot him in the head. The man went limp and toppled to the road, blood pooling around him. Jim sidestepped the growing puddle.

"Oh shit…wait, wait…" the taller man said, now convinced. He held his hands outward, gesturing for Jim to stop.

Jim raised the revolver and shot him through the skull.

* * *

Later, they stood together in the building that housed the county Sherriff's department, sifting through piles of trash and opening desk drawers. Jim wasn't paying any attention to the garbage he was shifting around.

"Does it bother you when I kill people like that?" he asked. She'd reassured him dozens of times that she understood what he did and why and that she would have done it herself if he hadn't, but it always bothered him. If he detached himself, he knew it was a necessary function of survival in the world in which they now lived, but he didn't want her to think him a monster. He was scared that if she saw this enough, she would leave him.

"Does it bother you when I do it?" she asked, making a face that clearly stated how ridiculous she felt the question was.

"It's different. You've never put someone on their knees."

"But I would. You know I would."

"I do it so you don't have to," Jim said, finally. Erin looked at him, her expression grave in its sincerity.

"That's why it will never bother me. You're a good man. I know you don't like doing it. It would be different if you did, but you don't. It doesn't bother me at all and never will. And yes, I'll still love you," she said. She made her voice as strong and convincing as she could. She knew how much this ate away at him. She thinks it's probably the only thing he's insecure about. Jim found he couldn't speak and instead nodded and looked away. Erin approached him and squeezed his hand.

They walked towards the back of the building and eventually came to an armory that looked like it had once held a lot, but now there were only scraps. Jim squatted on the floor and picked up the discarded slide of a Beretta, its surface pitted and weathered. Jim blew dust from it and set it back on the floor. Erin had moved further into the armory and was opening several cabinets, searching for anything they could use. In the bottom of one cabinet, three boxes of .223 rounds had fallen into the gap between the bottom shelf and the back of the cabinet. She handed the three boxes to Jim.

"'Ain't been any ammo around here in God knows how long'," Erin said in a deep voice, imitating the man she had killed a half hour prior. Jim took the boxes with a grin.

"There's always something if you look hard enough," he said. In the corner of the room, underneath the broken pane of a high window and back behind a shelf, they found a duplicate of Erin's shotgun. Jim held it up and asked her which she preferred.

"This one is fine, but that one has the grip and the longer stock. But mine is taken care of better," she answered. They sat on the floor and Jim used a multi tool to swap out the stocks. Instead of discarding the old pistol grip, he put it into their small pack and turned his attention back to the gun. Erin was right; the outside of the gun was pitted and rusting, but the stainless steel bolt would be alright. After some work, he managed to free the bolt and the feed ramp and packed those away, too.

"Spare parts. Smarty pants," Erin teased him, reaching up to ruffle his hair. He smiled at her. They found a few dusty bottles of gun cleaner and oil and took them. They found no food.

* * *

In a house they found the dried and shrunken bodies of two children and a woman, all shot through the chest and laid out neatly on the floor, the living room standing as a dusty sepulcher. Sitting at the kitchen table, a fourth body of a man with an exit wound in the top of his hollowed head. In the basement they found two cases of MREs and two plastic jugs of water. A line of cots with sleeping bags, a toilet improvised out of a five gallon bucket, a lantern and its empty cans of fuel. They were so week from eating next to nothing the past week that they almost wept at the sight of the food. In a shed in the back yard, they found a wheel barrow with a flat tire and Jim set the food and water in it and they pushed it through the front gate, out onto the street, and back towards the library with Erin scanning the fronts of houses for any signs of life, the broken windows empty eye sockets bearing witness to this new America. This new world.

* * *

They weren't the only ones to arrive at Dwight's that morning. Pam, Michael, and Angela were already there when they arrived and Ryan and Kelly showed up a few hours later, driving an older model car Jim didn't recognize. The car was packed with food and water and Kelly's suitcases and Ryan was wearing a bullet proof vest and police belt heavy with a pistol and magazines. He had come across a police officer lying dead in an intersection right outside his apartment and had stripped off the vest and the gun belt, nauseated but aware how necessary it might be to have a weapon.

When they pulled up the dirt road between the beet fields, Mose stood at the gate separating the fields from Dwight's farmhouse. He was somber, looking into the dust rising behind the car, holding a scoped deer rifle. He said nothing but smiled slightly and gave a little wave as they drove through, then shut the gate behind them and resumed his post. After Ryan and Kelly arrived, figuring no one else would be coming, Mose joined his cousin and his co-workers in touring the grounds.

Dwight either knew something like this was coming or was more naturally cautious than Jim had ever imagined. The farmhouse had a bank of recently installed solar panels on the roof, feeding into ten daisy-chained deep cycle batteries. With the system in place, they would have lights and be able to use power tools. Dwight had kept the tools and other emergency electronics stored in some sort of special box that protected them from whatever had killed the rest of the electronics in the area.

The basement of his farmhouse had been converted into an almost-bomb shelter. A half dozen metal cots were set up along one wall with sleeping bags neatly arranged over them. There were shelves of freeze dried food, big plastic bins of things like coffee and sugar and flour, sealed plastic tubs of different types of grain, boxes of non-hybrid seed packets, racks of Dwight's rifles, metal boxes filled with ammunition, military vests and armor. There was a generator hooked into the house's electrical system and there were jerry cans of diesel fuel. A whole other room off the basement was filled with various bits of equipment and gear that Dwight had acquired that would be potentially useful and included two book shelves of various technical and survival manuals. Originally, he said, he figured his gun club would stay at the farm if anything ever happened, but Dwight had left the group after realizing the other members weren't very serious at all about preparedness.

* * *

Jim and Erin sat on the dusty couch of a corner office on the second floor of the library, which had apparently housed a few municipal offices. They had retrieved their hidden packs and walked up a creaking wooden stair case to the second floor to eat and watch the road. The MREs were designed by the military to be used in the field by deployed personnel. Jim knew each meal contained around two thousand calories, which they desperately needed. Each meal came with its own water-activated flameless heater. They sat and ate food that was hot and surprisingly good/

After they had eaten until they were full, they shouldered up their packs and set out into the fading daylight. On the edge of the tiny hamlet, they came across a bar and went in and checked back in the kitchen and behind the bar, but there was nothing to be found so they left everything as it was and continued walking.

* * *

"I don't think I was ever religious," Erin said out of nowhere hours later as they walked down the road. She would be silent for long stretches and then would usually always bring up something that Jim thought was pretty far out in left field. She used to do it before all of this, so he always just went with it. It was one of the many, many things he adored about her.

"Me neither. Except when I was a kid. I was an altar boy until I was like…sixteen," Jim responded.

"Why'd you stop being an altar boy?"

"I don't know. I felt too old for it, I guess. And I think I was sort of growing out of religion. I still believed, but just didn't see the use in all the church," he answered. The topic of religion was something they never talked about before everything fell apart and it was something they talked about only a few times since.

"I know exactly what you mean," she said. They walked on in silence. It was getting dark and Jim started looking off to either side of the road with regularity, searching for a place where they could weather the oncoming night. After a while, she spoke again.

"Do you still believe in God?"

"No, I don't."

"Me neither."

* * *

Jim and Erin decided to claim the Irrigation Room as their own. The memories of staying there with Pam were faded, but they were still there, however distant they might seem. They rearranged the room and pushed the two smaller beds together, using spare bedding to fill in the gap between the mattresses. A few days had passed since everything had happened and they had sought refuge with Dwight. They spent those days familiarizing themselves with the farm and the woods around it. They cut firewood and inventoried supplies. They took light bulbs out of non-essential rooms and put them into storage as more spares. In the rooms where light bulbs were left, they blacked out windows with spray paint and taped cardboard over the painted panes. They checked and rechecked the solar system and Dwight taught them all how it worked. When they were done with all that, they took inventory again. They worked out a watch schedule and Dwight issued them weapons and taught them how to use them.

Jim's watch had just ended and he returned with Mose through the darkness to the house after being relieved by Ryan and Kelly, who was a surprisingly good aim with a shotgun. In the kitchen, Angela was trying to teach Michael how to make candles out of the supplies Dwight had put up. She talked and demonstrated slowly and patiently, as if she were talking to a child. Michael proved to loathe physical labor and no one was comfortable with him carrying anything larger than a .22 caliber pistol. He wasn't a particularly good shot and his attitude hadn't changed since the cataclysm. It was still apparent that he thought of himself as a leader when his attitude and lack of skill made him anything but. His irresponsibility was something they all were keenly aware of and whenever he had to stand watch, someone was assigned to stay glued to his side at all times. Jim watched as Michael copied Angela's movements and his results were identical to hers. Maybe there was hope for him yet.

Pam sat at the wood burning stove and stoked the flames. To save battery power, they cut the lights around ten every night. The only light in the kitchen came from the stove and candles set to stand in Mason jars. On top of the stove, an old fashioned percolator brewed coffee and a tea pot steamed next to it. After a while, Pam would head out to find Ryan and Kelly walking their separate watch routes. Ryan would get a thermos of black coffee and Kelly a thermos of tea. She looked up as Jim and Mose entered and removed their jackets. Jim made eye contact for a brief second and smiled a little before patting Mose on the back and wishing them all a good night.

Erin was in their room reading a book about wild edibles by oil lamp. When Jim stepped through the doorway, she looked up and smiled and put a piece of string between the pages to mark her place. She set her book on the night stand next to the lamp, on top of papers Dwight had give them to look over: how to make biodiesel using restaurant grease traps, manufacturing lamp oil from rendered animal fat, and so on. It was only a few days in and they still had plenty of supplies, but they all felt it was better to be proactive. He kicked off his Dwight-issue boots and cracked his neck before standing the rifle next to hers near their bed.

"How was watch?" she asked.

"Heard some more shots off in the direction of the city. Besides that, all quiet on the western front," Jim said, tossing his jacket over a chair back. He moved and stood behind Erin where she sat. He no longer had to stoop because the pipe fittings that had once adorned the walls had been removed and added to the equipment room. She sat with her hands on her thighs and her head tilted all the way back, looking up at him with an open, smiling mouth and wide eyes. He ran his fingers across her temples and through her hair slowly.

"Hey there, Upside Down Man."

"You're Upside Down Man. At least from this angle."

"Woman. Upside Down Woman."

"Right, my mistake."

Her eyes slid shut and Jim let his go out of focus and they stood there for a few minutes, the only sounds the sputtering flame of the lamp and the whispering of his fingers through her hair. From the hallway outside, they heard the creak of a floorboard and the sound of retreating footsteps. Jim's eyes focused on the hallway just in time to see Pam's back get swallowed by the darkness behind the projected lamp light. He looked down and saw that Erin hadn't opened her eyes. He squeezed her shoulders lightly.

"Hot chocolate?" he asked.

"Yes, please," Erin responded. Bending at the waist, Jim kissed her chin and she smiled and stood and stretched, the fabric of her shirt riding up as she arched her back. Reluctantly, he left the sight of smooth, alabaster skin and headed downstairs. Pam was waiting at the foot of the stairs and Jim cringed inwardly.

"I'm alone," she said simply.

"Uh…there's like seven other people living here. You're not alone," he responded.

"Don't do that. I'm alone because you left me for her. You left me alone, in all of this," she said softly, but sharply. Jim sighed.

"That happened months ago, Pam. I'm sorry it had to end like that, but it's over. You need to move on."

"Oh, I'm sorry, Jim, but I don't have someone to move on with, so it's been a little _difficult_ for me," her voice was rising and Jim grabbed her arm and pulled her into another room so Erin wouldn't hear.

"What do you want me to do about it?" Jim asked.

"Break up with Erin and get back with me. She's not right for you and we have all this history. Don't you remember how long _you_ wanted _me_?" she asked. Her answer to his question had been instantaneous and Jim clenched his jaw.

"Yes, and I remember that a lot of that history was me feeling like shit. And no, I didn't have any history with Erin, not like I had with you. I'm sorry if it bothers you that things with Erin just happened, without any sort of 'reason' or build up, but don't you ever say she's not right for me. If she wasn't, I wouldn't be with her," he said, trying to keep his voice low.

"You're an asshole," Pam spit out.

"Nice. I loved you Pam, I really did. And I still care about you, but you can't act like this. Especially after everything that's happened. You need to move on," Jim said before turning on his heel and walking into the kitchen.

Michael didn't bother trying to hide the fact that they had heard the argument and was openly staring at Jim as he entered. Angela was putting away the candles they had made and Dwight had come in from the barn and was warming his hands at the wood stove. Both were pointedly not looking at him. Jim filled the kettle with water and put it to boil, then stood next to Dwight and held his hands out to the heat.

"Everything okay?" Dwight asked.

"I don't know. You heard?"

"Sort of hard not to," Dwight responded. Jim let out a quiet, humorless laugh.

"Yeah, I guess so."

"There are more important things to worry about now," Dwight said after a moment.

"I know that, Dwight," Jim replied.

"I know you do. I just meant that I think it's unreasonable for her to be doing this when there are more important things to worry about," Dwight said. He reached out and clasped a hand over Jim's shoulder. For his part, Jim was silent for a while.

"Thanks, man. I appreciate it," he said and moved the kettle off the stove. Dwight sat at the kitchen table with Angela and together they spread out the various knives and set to sharpening them with flat, black honing stones. Michael watched them as Jim stood at the counter and made two mugs of hot chocolate. When he left the kitchen, Dwight had begun to patiently show Michael how to sharpen the knives.

Upstairs, Erin sat on the bed with her knees drawn up to her chest and Jim knew that, like the others, she had heard.

"So…you obviously heard that," Jim said, closing the door with his foot and then walking over to hand her a mug. She took the mug and nodded, saying nothing and refusing to look at him. He sat on the bed next to her and sipped at his mug.

"I know you and Pam have this long history…" she started.

"Shut up," Jim interrupted.

"Excuse me?" she said, snapping her head up to look at him. He was smiling.

"I said 'Shut up' because you were about to say that you would understand if I wanted to go back to that," Jim explained.

"That _might not_ have been what I was going to say," she said, blushing and smiling slightly, clearly embarrassed.

"It is what you were going to say. And you really would have understood. And _that_ is one of the reasons it's a non-issue. Erin, all that history that you think is so big? Everything you're worried about me wanting back? I left all of that for you," Jim said.

"You didn't _have_ to," Erin said.

"Nope. But I wanted to. In the end, it was an easy decision. You were the only thing that made sense. And now you're everything," Jim said, reaching out and closing his hand around one of her slender ankles, trailing his thumb over the delicate bone there, just beneath her porcelain skin. She managed to almost stifle her smile and lift her chin in mock indignation.

"You…are just trying to get in my pants," she said.

"Is it working?" he asked, setting his mug on the table with hers and moving closer to her. She stood and pushed her jeans over her hips and down to the floor.

* * *

_Hope you liked it! Please review! I love reviews! Elwood is a real town and from the satellite pictures, it looks like a nice, homey small town. The special box Dwight used to preserve some electronics is called a Faraday Cage or Box and will protect electronics from the varying field strengths of an EMP. They are very, very easy to build yourself. Some people might wonder why the farmhouse has a solar system AND a diesel generator: emergencies. The solar system is good for every day use, but in the event of an emergency or in the event you need a power boost, the generator would be excellent and could more effectively power outdoor lighting (floodlights, etc.)_


	5. Chapter 5

Note: Thanks to everyone who has read and reviewed this and I apologize for such a delay in the fifth chapter. I hope you enjoy it and find the delay worth it. What can I say? It's summer time and I am fairly busy, but I hope to work through any writer's block and distractions in order to maintain some kind of momentum on this. Updates may be a little scarce, but I still fully plan on seeing this story through to the end (whatever that may be). Thank you again for coming back and reading and I encourage you all to please review, whether you enjoy the story or absolutely hate it. Thanks again.

* * *

Jim figured it was the second week in December when they decided they could go no further. The road was an undulating sea of snow drifts and the wind blew frigid from the north. They were going to have to find some place to stay for the winter. At the very least, they needed a place to recover from the grueling work of setting forth through snow up to their knees.

They had had good luck recently. Passing through yet another small town, they had come across more food than would fit in their bags. Erin had the idea to build a sled, since they needed a way to transport more than their packs would fit and it would be necessary to push or drag it through the increasing amount of snow blanketing the earth. After searching the town for the better part of a day, they had fashioned a sort of sled out of two large plastic bins and four pairs of mismatched skis they had managed to find. They cut holes in the bins small enough so that when the bindings of the skis were wedged in, they wouldn't be easily removed. With lengths of rope that had remained unused in their packs, they fashioned harnesses for themselves and, by looping the rope through holes punched into the bins, they could easily slide the whole thing through the snow. The vehicle had a learning curve, but once they were used to it, they had no problem.

But the rate of snowfall was astounding and in a week, perhaps two at the most, the roads would be impassable. Already Jim could feel a heavy cold settling around them. He tapped Erin's shoulder and they both stopped, shucking their rope harnesses off and leaning against the blue tarp pulled taut over the top of their sled. They pushed the hoods of the cold weather parkas they had found back and ran their fingers through damp, sweaty hair. The wind blew snow around them and it was quiet except for the creaking of pine trees alongside them. Jim unzipped his parka and pulled out the relevant map and brushed snow from the tarp and spread the map out.

"Just past this next bend should be another town. Moorefield, Nebraska. We'll stop there and figure out where we can stop for the winter," Jim said, pointing a gloved finger at the town.

"We're going to stop for the winter?" Erin asked.

"I think we should. It's getting too cold and the snow is getting too deep. We need to figure out what the best place to stop is. It has to be somewhere where we can lay up where no one will see us, but where we can find supplies," he explained.

"That's a really tall order," she said, chewing her bottom lip and looking at the map.

"I know. It doesn't help that everything out here is spread out so fucking much," Jim said. Erin elbowed him in the ribs.

"That's why it's called 'flyover country', dummy."

* * *

Fortunately for them, Moorefield had a very small public library. They spent two days searching the town for supplies and going through papers in the library, searching for a population map. They both agreed that they should find a decent sized town surrounded by as much nothing as possible, while still being within a day or two walk of another town. Their parameters were pretty specific, but they were lucky enough to stumble across census reports and population maps from the last census. The population density maps were of little practical use as all they said was that the entire area they were in was dotted with small population centers, but this wasn't news to either of them. They had been walking for weeks now and knew what kind of distance lay between each small enclave.

They finally settled on a town a few dozen miles down the road called Curtis. Inexplicably, there was an agricultural college there and Jim hoped that the campus and the surrounding town would produce supplies they could stock for the winter. There were also a number of towns well within walking distance that could supplement anything they found. It was a gamble for sure, but it was a necessary one. After the third day in Moorefield, they harnessed themselves in and began dragging their sledge through the driving snow, closing the miles between them and Curtis.

The storm didn't let up and it was very slow going. There was nowhere to stop along the way, so they had to force themselves to walk all through the day and into the night, using batteries and flashlights long since held in reserve to cut swaths out of the darkness through which they trudged. In better times, the distance was probably a forty-five minute car ride. In these times, it sapped their strength and exhausted them. Just before dawn, as the storm finally started to abate, they came into Curtis, the dark shapes of the houses looming up from the snow like monoliths left behind by some long-dead civilization.

Jim and Erin dragged the sled up the front drive of the closest house, pulling it through the drifts until it was hidden from view. They pulled their pistols and kicked the snow away from a back door and pulled it open. The beams of their flashlights played in the small enclosed space of a back porch. Dust motes floated gracefully. Along one wall in the narrow space was a long wicker couch with a faded floral cushion. Jim stepped aside and ushered Erin in, then shoved his pistol into the pocket of his pants and went and retrieved their bags from the sledge. The tarp was already covered with snow. He returned, his muscles aching, and dropped their packs on the wicker couch. He could barely keep his eyes open and saw that Erin was struggling as well.

Together, they opened the door from the porch into a kitchen and played their beams across the cabinets before moving forward, their guns held in numb hands. The first floor was semi-ransacked and they were careful to step around an entertainment center where it lay tipped over, broken glass pooled around it like crystalline blood. Jim lead the way up the stairs to the second floor, but by now he was certain the house would be empty. And so it was.

With the last bit of their strength, they went back down and hauled up their packs, which were almost entirely filled with food since they wore most of their clothes in layers the past few bitterly cold days. They picked a room and dropped the packs and both sat at the edge of the bed, panting like hounds in the depth of an August drought. Erin recovered before Jim, who sat there with his eyes shut tightly, lungs burning. Erin stood and lifted his ice cold chin and kissed him, briefly, then went through the other rooms and hauled in a pile of blankets. She shut the door and barricaded it by tipping over a nearby dresser. Jim forced himself to get up and check the drapes over the windows. He lifted them and in the very first light of pre-dawn, he could just make out the street. The wind howled and screamed in the eaves and Jim could see that their tracks out in the road had been almost entirely blown in.

Together, he and Erin stripped down to t-shirts and underwear and crawled quickly beneath the pile of blankets. They lay shivering in the blackness of the room, listening to the wind and feeling the welcome sensation of the other's warmth seeping through their skin. Jim wrapped his arms tightly around her and pressed his face in her hair. Her breath was hot against the crook of his neck.

"We made it," he said.

"I know. Now we can sleep,"

"I love you," he breathed into her hair. Her response was to press her body tightly into his, her hands fisting in the back of his shirt before growing slack as their breathing evened out and they lost consciousness.

* * *

"Michael, slow down and stay back with us," Dwight whispered as loudly as he dared.

"My favorite pizza place is up here. Maybe we can find some food there," Michael said, ignoring Dwight.

They were moving up a side street in downtown Scranton six months after the lights went out. Dwight and Jim were walking point, wearing heavy body armor and carrying their rifles at the ready. Ryan brought up the rear and carried his rifle and himself in such a way that Jim wondered what he had done before business school. Back at the farm, Mose was standing watch with the girls. When the group had started off, Pam had intently avoided looking at Jim, but there was nothing he could do about whatever she was going through.

"Michael, it's not safe. Get back here now," Dwight commanded sternly.

"Shut it, Dwight. The city is still here, we've probably been hiding on your stupid farm for no reason and missed out on a rescue or something," Michael dismissed Dwight completely.

If Michael had been paying closer attention to his surroundings, rather than to the fact that the buildings were still standing, he would see where tall weeds had already taken back portions of Scranton's perpetually ill-repaired sidewalks. Buildings stood tall and silent, some missing only a few window panes, some missing nearly all. Twice, Jim's feet had kicked loose empty shell casings from the trash and grass they made their way through. The apartment buildings they passed stood open and empty, broken glass scattered through the streets.

The rest of the group increased their pace in an attempt to overtake Michael and rein him in before they reached the intersection at the end of the block, but they were all wary of the echoing of their footsteps bouncing off the buildings towering over the street and were forced to slow themselves. Because of this, Michael was the first to reach the intersection.

He stood in the center of the street, in a thick shaft of sunlight that has slipped in through the spaces in the skyline. Michael shielded his eyes in the bright sunlight and turned to face the rest of the party as they were just coming up to the intersection.

"Hurry up, guys," he whined. Jim rolled his eyes and then jumped at the sound of a gunshot cannonading through the streets, shattering the stillness of the afternoon. Michael's eyes went wide and his body went rigid. A fine, red mist hung motionless in the sunlight as a dark stain grew upon his chest, soaking his jacket. He took a stuttering step backwards, like he was trying to steady himself and then toppled to the pavement. Ryan rushed forward and slid into cover near the rusting hulk of a station wagon stalled in the middle of the street, almost in the crossroads. The rest of the group broke off and found cover. Jim dashed into an alcove of an office building and carefully looked around the corner into the intersection where Michael lay gasping in the street.

"Michael! Don't move!" he shouted, shouldering his rifle. Across the street, Dwight was crouched a short distance away from Ryan, taking shelter behind an overturned mail truck. He leaned his own rifle up against the truck's undercarriage and unshouldered the deer rifle he was carrying.

"Did anyone see anything?" Dwight yelled. Jim was about to answer when Ryan spoke up.

"Both of you, stop talking right now," he shouted. Jim watched as he edged around the front of the station wagon and peered over the hood. After a few moments, he dropped back down and shook his head. He couldn't see anything without exposing himself to whoever had shot Michael. A few feet away, Michael groaned and coughed and spit up blood. Ryan slid back towards the side mirror and slammed it with the butt of his rifle, turning his face from the spray of glass. Ryan selected a larger shard and, carefully gripping it between his thumb and forefinger, used it to peer over the edge of the car's hood. After a few tense seconds, Jim saw the motion of the mirror in his hand stop. Ryan squinted, then set the glass on the ground and adjusted the grip on his rifle. He turned towards Jim and mouthed, slowly and deliberately, that he saw someone in a fourth floor window overlooking the intersection. Ryan couldn't tell if there was anyone else with him or if they were on their way down to finish them off. He passed the information on to Dwight and then discussed their plan.

Jim stuck his head slowly around the gray concrete of the building and quickly ducked back in. He got his legs tensed underneath him and took a few deep breaths. Ryan nodded his head and Jim broke from cover and started sprinting towards the station wagon. Almost immediately, he heard a shot from the building across the intersection and the corresponding high whine of a ricochet from behind him. Jim put on more speed. Twenty yards from the car and he simultaneously heard a second gunshot and felt a long, burning scratching down his left shoulder. The pain spread through his shoulder and down his back and he winced, but it only slowed him for a few clumsy steps and as he reached the car, he saw that Ryan was up with his rifle braced on the hood, firing into the shooter's position. Jim crouched next to him.

"Keep moving! Keep moving!" Ryan yelled and Jim shot to his feet and moved around the car, rifle tucked into his shoulder at the ready. His heart was pounding as he moved quickly forward, the sound of Ryan's rifle deafening in the trash-blown courtyard of the intersection. He passed Michael, lying in a pool of his own blood, his face tallow-white and sweat slicked. Dwight was grabbing him by the collar and dragging him back towards Ryan's position, leaving a wide, dark red streak behind him. Jim came to a stop alongside the entrance to the shooter's building and waited. Once Dwight had Michael safe, Ryan broke his cover and walked towards Jim, emptying the last of his magazine into the window. He came up to the door and stood opposite Jim, dropping the empty magazine into a pouch at his belt and loading it with a full one.

"I'm not sure if I got him or not. He's not in the window," Ryan explained quickly. Jim nodded. Ryan held up three fingers and ticked them down slowly. When he made a fist, they both quickly pivoted and pointed their guns through the broken glass door of the building. Just as they were doing so, a man with a shotgun coming down the stairs saw them and started to turn, either to shout a warning or retreat, and was instantly cut down by fire from their rifles. They moved into the building and took turns ascending and covering each other while they moved. At the fourth floor landing, they stood off to the sides of the door and Ryan pulled the stairwell door open. Jim was halfway around the door jamb to peer down the hallway when the clap of a high-powered gunshot made him move back at the last possible instant. The shot whined by them and bored into the wall behind them in a cloud of plaster. Ryan came around in a low crouch and fired two rounds, then a third, and stood slowly. Jim relaxed and felt the dull throb of his shoulder, the hot trickle of blood down his back, as he stepped next to Ryan. Halfway down the long hallway, behind an overturned file cabinet, a man with a scoped rifle lay on the floor, shot twice through the chest and once through the head. Ryan was breathing heavily, but in a slow, controlled fashion. His rifle still pointed at the downed figure and his body was still tensed.

"Secure the weapon. I'll cover the target," Ryan said automatically. Jim said nothing and stepped forward and over the body to retrieve the man's rifle. He heard Ryan lower his weapon as Jim searched the man's pockets, coming up empty handed. Jim saw a frayed backpack leaning against the wall not far from the body and stooped to pick it up. Mostly rifle ammunition, but there were a few granola bars and a box of matches. He slung the bag over his shoulder along with the man's rifle and followed a more relaxed Ryan down the stairwell to the first body, which they searched and came up with a single box of shotgun ammunition. Ryan slung his rifle and picked up the dead man's shotgun, checking to make sure the chamber was loaded before he and Jim walked out into the dusty afternoon sunlight.

Dwight had his pack opened and was trying to staunch the blood flow from Michael's gunshot. Michael was staring up at the sky, blinking slowly and wheezing. Jim and Ryan hurried over and knelt beside him in a spreading pool of blood.

"Missed the heart, definitely got the lung," Dwight said, discarding a soaked piece of gauze for a fresh one.

"Definitely got the lung," Michael wheezed, barely above a whisper. Listening to his breath wheezing in and out and kneeling in his warm, sticky blood, Jim felt something terrible expand in his chest. He felt a dry tickle at the back of his throat and his mouth felt like it was filled with some gelid coagulate. He found it impossible to speak and instead looked pointedly at Dwight. Dwight met his eyes and shook his head, at a loss. In the end, it was Ryan who took over. He leaned forward against the shotgun and grabbed Michael's hand.

"Hey, buddy. Can you feel my hand?" he asked, his voice strong and level.

"Yeah," Michael nodded weakly and then coughed fitfully, his body straining. When he was done, there was blood dribbling from his lips. Ryan wiped the blood away and took up his hand once more.

"Look at the sky. Can you see? Looks like it's going to be a nice afternoon," Ryan said casually, looking up at the blue expanse just above the buildings rising above them. Michael smiled slightly and made a soft, inarticulate noise and Ryan continued.

"Just look at the clouds. I dated this girl once who knew all the different types of clouds. Cumulonimbus and cirrus and cumulus. I never knew the difference even though she explained it, like, a dozen different times."

"Cumulus…are t-th-the…white, puffy ones. Like…like cotton," Michael's voice was barely a whisper but it seemed deafening to them as he struggled to talk. No one bothered telling him to save his strength.

"Like cotton," Ryan repeated and smiled slightly at Michael. Jim's eyes stung and he still couldn't speak. Somewhere in the street, a bird sang a few high, trilling notes and was silent. Michael kept his eyes on the clouds, his lips still forming that small smile, and he spoke once more, clear and steady.

"I think it _is_ going to be a nice afternoon," he said. His body seized once, twice and was still as his final breath left his body, the sound of it very much like a breeze. Ryan held his hand a moment longer and then reached steady fingers up to close his eyes which, though now lifeless, shone with the light and blue brilliance of the afternoon sky.

* * *

Jim woke just as the sun was rising and he had a brief moment of confusion before he realized they must have slept through the entire day and night before. Brilliant reddish orange light pierced the darkness from between a gap in the curtains and Jim figured the storm must have passed. Erin still snored quietly beside him. He gently untangled their limbs and slipped from beneath the warm pile of blankets into the frigid room, where he dressed quickly.

Jim stretched in the thing sliver of fiery morning light and then walked to the window and peered out. The houses huddled next to each other were hemmed in by large snow drifts and the road was completely indistinguishable from the driven snow. He saw no footprints. Quietly, he moved the dresser blocking the door and left the bedroom to find something in which to build a fire.

Jim moved silently down the hallway and then down the staircase, listening to the creaking of the house around him. In a closet off of the kitchen, he found a small metal trash can and brought it out and set it on the kitchen counter. He opened the oven and brushed some trash out of the way and removed the baking rack and set it with the can. After making sure he was bundled up against the cold, he pulled up his hood and drew the strings tight and tried to open the door into the back yard. At first, it wouldn't move and he had to brace his shoulder and heave against it before it finally loosed the pack snow enough to swing slowly open.

Their sledge was buried in a snow drift and Jim set to work digging it out. When he was finished, he walked back towards the trees in the house's backyard. A number of the dead limbs hung close to the ground and Jim broke these off and dragged them wholly onto the back porch, where he broke them apart until he had a decent sized pile. He retrieved the trash can, filled it up with wood and with the oven rack in hand, climbed the stairs and walked the short hallway back toward the bedroom overlooking the road.

When Erin woke, she stuck her head out from underneath the blankets and was surprised by the warmth in the room. Yawning, she rubbed the sleep from her eyes and sat up. Jim was in the corner heating up soup on a fire he built in a metal can. A second pot steamed steadily and Erin smelled tea. A cold draft from the window Jim cracked for ventilation only reinforced how warm the room was. Jim looked up from where he sat next to the smoking trash can and smiled at her. She still felt flutters every time he did that.

"How long were we out?" she asked.

"The whole day and night," Jim replied. Her eyebrows rose, surprised at how tired they had actually been and then her stomach rumbled. She grinned sheepishly at Jim.

"I'm really hungry."

"Good, because on our menu today we have soup as a starter and hot tea with powdered milk and sugar."

"Oh, fancy. What's my entrée?"

"Chicken and noodle MRE."

"My favorite," Erin said excitedly. She climbed out of bed and dressed and sat next to Jim, who pressed a tin cup of tea into her eager hands. They sat in silence, the only sound the crackle of the fire and Erin's sipping. After a while, she noticed Jim had one hand shoved up underneath his sweater rubbing idly at his left shoulder and the thin white scar of his old wound.

"Is it hurting?" she asked. At his questioning look, she tilted her head at his shoulder. Immediately his hand stilled.

"No. No. I just dreamt about that day last night," he answered.

"You haven't had that dream in a while," she stated simply. He nodded.

"I'm not done thinking about it, I guess," he replied. Erin nodded slowly before leaning in abruptly to kiss his cheek.

"Let's eat," she said.

"Okay."

* * *

They spent the day searching the town. The university sat a few miles northeast of where they entered the town. The buildings stood silently in the deep drifts and a precursory search found most of the buildings untouched and sealed. Jim figured their chances of finding supplies and food were pretty good, given the size of the town itself, the condition of the university, and the decent amount of bars and restaurants within the city limits. Jim briefly wondered what happened to leave this place a standing, intact ghost town. He thought it had something to do with the fading orange FEMA marks spray painted on the doors, but it was no use puzzling it out and coming to some sort of answer. It would make no difference whether or not an answer was at hand.

They were guided in their wanderings by a street map of the town Jim found hanging in the police station after they broke a window and climbed in. Oddly, the gun racks in the armory were empty though the building was orderly in a dusty, long standing way. Another question whose answer would make no difference.

At the northern end of town, they came to a single two lane road leading out. When he asked if she thought they should turn back, Erin told him they should continue, just for a little bit. Jim agreed and together they pushed through the powdery, waist high snow. It turned out to be a fortuitous decision. Half a mile out of town they found a small break in the pine trees hidden behind a large, fallen tree that wound inward until it was lost in the thick trunks. After they climbed through the maze of branches to the other side, Jim squatted and dug into the snow until he hit what he figured was a dirt road. Pacing the width of the break in the trees, he discovered two small ditches that reinforced his conclusion. He looked at Erin and she shrugged and they pressed on into the trees, following the winding path until eventually the trees broke away into large fields on either side of them. They stood where the tree line ended and both looked into the distance at a large, two story farm house. Behind it stood a weathered red barn and Jim thought he could just make out the hulks of snow-buried machinery. Jim turned excitedly to Erin.

"Should we check it out?" he asked, already knowing her answering. She nodded her head furiously.

"Definitely."

Both the house and the barn were tightly boarded up at the windows and doors, but Jim found a crowbar in the cab of a tractor and, with some effort, they managed to pry their way through the frozen boards and into the frozen tomb of the house's kitchen. The counters were dusty, but uncluttered. When he opened a drawer, silverware rattled into sight. In the living room, furniture was covered with drop cloths and the large stone fireplace was empty. Upstairs, the beds were bare, but the closets held blankets folded and zipped into plastic covers. There were no family photos, personal knick-knacks, or clothing in any of the rooms. The medicine cabinet in the upstairs bathroom was closed tightly, but its shelves were bare and they found no toothbrushes except for a few dusty spares in the back of a linen closet, behind some towels.

"When everything happened, they shut the place up, took everything they needed or could carry, and went somewhere," Erin gave voice to what they both were apparently thinking.

"There are no other houses in this clearing. Maybe they cut the tree down when they left to hide the road. If we kept going along, I bet we would have found another tree cut down or something," Jim responded.

"The people, the farmers, who lived here were smart," Erin said, impressed.

"We found this place, though. So we're at least as smart," Jim smiled down at her. She reached up and scratched his beard.

"Yes we are. We have to be, don't we?" she said. Jim agreed with her and they checked the rest of the house. In the cellar, the found no canned food, but they found dozens and dozens of canning jars filled with various vegetables. Jim saw jars of potatoes, tomatoes, carrots, even cucumbers. In the dim light of the cellar he saw that there were jars of preserves as well. The slight temperature difference of the cellar to the outside had so far kept the jars from freezing and bursting, but he didn't think this would last much longer as the weather worsened. Jim picked up a jar of potatoes and held it up to the light. After a minute, he put it back on the shelf and he and Erin climbed the stairs and pulled the drop cloth off a sofa and sat there.

"Home for the winter?" Erin asked, finally.

"Home," Jim said. She hugged him tightly and they sat for a few moments longer before beginning the long walk back to retrieve their things.

* * *

Thank you for reading! Please review.


	6. Chapter 6

_Note: Well, this sure did take a while. I've been working on it off and on since the last post. You know how it is, doing other things and whatever. Erin's background isn't canon with the show because I think the writers did a shitty job of characterizing Erin. Like so many of the characters in the most recent seasons, she has become completely one-dimension (at least to me). So I took liberties. Sue me as hard as you possibly can. Thanks to everyone who has left me reviews. **One Fine Wire** in particular left me a review I'm not sure I deserve and I thank him/her (Sorry, I couldn't figure out your gender from your profile. My bad.) I hope you enjoy this chapter and I hope it's up to snuff, given the length of time it's taken to get published and I apologize for any errors that might have slipped past my careful read-through. Some always do._

* * *

Shears of red and orange light spilled over the horizon and across the desert and Jim raised one hand up to shield his eyes from the setting sun. Before him, spread out like a blanket, lay the vast and largely empty expanse of Terrell County Texas. Sweat ran slowly down his face and he was glad for the oncoming night. The heat of the day had been unbearable and he had spent most of it in a suit in a church with no air conditioning.

From his perch on the picnic table outside Erin's cousin's house, Jim scanned the horizon slowly. Buttes, mesas, sage brush; it was almost entirely unspoiled desert painted in the fading light. The bottle in his hand had stopped sweating a while ago and he drained the last of the warm beer. He heard footsteps in the dirt behind him and figured it was Erin, her hair still done from the wedding earlier.

"Hey there, mister," she said, climbing onto the weathered table next to him.

"Hey there, lady," he responded. She rested her chin on his shoulder and ran a hand up his back.

"You're sweaty," she teased.

"That is what happens when your cousin has her wedding in August."

"Oh, it wasn't _that_ hot today. And Sarah is letting us stay here until she gets back from the honeymoon next week. So it's not that bad a deal," Erin said. Jim smiled and slipped his hand onto her bare thigh, right beneath the cutoff of her shorts.

"You're right. But it _was_ hot today."

"Yes it was."

After the sun had set, the temperature had dropped a pleasant degree and they watched as millions of stars shone brilliantly above the desert. The wind picked up and whistled across the beer bottle's mouth as Jim's hand traveled further up Erin's thigh.

* * *

The axe whistled through the air and through the log with the sound of rending wood. Panting, Jim set the axe head in the snow and propped it up against the block on which he had been splitting wood for the better part of an hour. Around him, the howling wind blew snow across their fields, but it was a rare day when none fell from the sky. He pulled the scarf from around his mouth and breathed in the frigid air. It had been a month – maybe a month and a half; he wasn't exactly sure – since he and Erin had taken up residence in the farm house. The weather had gotten worse and the accumulation was just up to his elbows. He stacked the split wood carefully on an improvised sled and picked up the axe and trudged slowly down the narrow corridor he had cut from the snow with the shovel. Alongside the path, the snow was heaped in great piles just over Jim's head, a product of constantly having to keep the path clear so they could get around the farm as they needed in order to keep steady the flow of firewood into their new home.

When he reached the back door, Jim shouldered it open and, as fast as he could, transferred the firewood onto the large pile already sitting on a tarp next to the door. When he had it stacked neatly, the axe set beside it, he leaned the sled up against the snow banks, knocked snow from his boots, and stepped into the relative warmth of the kitchen, where he undressed.

The kitchen was right off from the living room and when the doors to the rest of the house were closed and a fire lit, both rooms were filled with a welcome warmth that allowed them to exist comfortably without dressing in layers. With his arms loaded down with wood, Jim walked into the living room where Erin was sitting cross-legged on the floor. Spread out before her on the large coffee table were the disassembled pieces of all of their weapons. Erin was methodically cleaning and oiling each piece until it gleamed in the flickering light of the fire before reassembly. She looked up and smiled warmly when he entered the room, then went back to her work. He took his coat off and draped it over the drying rack placed in front of the fireplace, then for a moment held his hands out to the flames, ridding them of their accumulated chill, before he sat on the couch behind her.

The living room, with its great stone hearth, was crowded with boxes and cartons of provisions they had managed to find after a month of scouring the surrounding area. The nearby agricultural college proved to be what they had hoped for and had provided them with food, raw grains, and medical supplies, in addition to tools and extra clothing and bedding. In one classroom, Jim had found a small solar array currently in pieces on their kitchen table, along with books about electronics, wiring, and solar power. He knew next to nothing about electrical wiring and less than that about solar panels, but when they were unable to leave the house because of the cold, it had absorbed their collective idleness and provided an output. Erin had even suggested searching the campus library the next time they went into town for books that could allow them some small inkling as to what they were doing with the panels.

The snow drifts in the fields were growing taller every day and one of the hardest things they found about this stationary life was keeping themselves busy. On the road, there was no security and they were always moving. They had to constantly be aware of their surroundings and while that had proven a great occupier of their time and their minds, the stress of living like that exhausted them. Neither of them knew just how tired they were until they stopped at the house in the clearing for the winter.

"So what are we doing today?" Erin asked, not looking up as she ran an oil stained rag gentle across a rifle barrel.

"Wood is cut for the day. You're cleaning weapons now. So I suppose that when you're done there, our dance cards are clear," Jim responded, leaning forward to run his hands along her under his fingers. They sat like that for a while before Erin spoke.

"We could go for a walk."

"A walk? It's pretty cold out, Hannon, and I don't want you to get the sniffles."

"Ha ha, Jim. What I mean is we take the same route all the time: the road out front to the left, through the trees, over our barricade, then right and continue into town. We don't know what happens if we walk out the front door and turn right. I'm bored and you're bored. We are both bored. Besides, I haven't been out in the snow in a day or two. I can promise no sniffles," she turned around and smiled up at him. She had a point. They were so busy the previous weeks gathering supplies, stocking and fortifying the house that they didn't have a chance to explore further. They never really had a need to. But now they had time.

"You've convinced me," Jim said.

"Pfft, like that's a challenge. I _always_ convince you," Erin smirked at him.

"Hey there," he replied playfully, "Big difference between convincing and browbeating, lady."

"I do not browbeat."

"Do too," he assured her. Erin hummed a sound of dissatisfaction but said nothing as she returned to her task. Jim leaned forward and kissed the top of her head and he could almost feel her trying to suppress a smile. He stood and crossed the room to the front of the house and stared out of the living room window into the gray light of the afternoon where, just beyond the panes of glass he had not yet boarded up, the cold beat like a heart outside of their new walls, edging ever inward but stopped by the fingertips of warmth the fire pushed out. Snow blew like dust clouds across the field, rattling in the frozen barbed wire of a tumbledown fence. Behind him, the sharp sounds of Erin's work reassembling their weapons. Clicks and clacks and metallic whispers like the ticking of some unseen clock counting seconds. He exhaled slowly and his breath fogged the window until he could see no more, his vision obscured by proof of life.

* * *

They were stopped just at the edge of their clearing after turning right from the front porch. Behind them, the farmhouse sat stoically facing the wind that blew through the field, seeping through their layers slowly, intent on numbing them. Jim clumsily held their shotgun in one of his gloved hands and with the other loosened the sling on Erin's rifle where it was slung across her back.

"Better?" he asked, turning her around to look at him. She nodded.

"Much. I can actually breathe now. Too many layers."

"No such thing in this weather," he replied, stamping his feet to keep the blood flowing.

"True. Let's get moving," she said, turning. He fell into step beside her and they trudged through the snow, great waves of it breaking over their thighs like soil over a plow as they pressed on down the narrow road through the trees. They walked in silence, the only sound the dull press of their feet into the snow. He could feel nothing below his knees and his hands were so cold, even with gloves, that he hoped that if they were in a situation that called for him to quickly fire the shotgun that someone would be nice enough to bury them. If they were even found. Still, a couple hundred yards further he could see that the trees ended in what he assumed was another clearing, so he pressed on. Erin reached it first and stopped. He came up alongside her and stared out across the field to the house in the distance.

"We should go back," Erin said from beside him. He was just about to ask her why when he saw the heavy, snow-covered shapes hanging in the branches of the tree in front of the house. He pulled one of the rifle scopes from the pocket of his parka and looked across the distance. Three large shapes and two small shapes alongside them. No question as to what they were, no question as to even why. One of two options: they did it themselves or it was done to them. Jim said nothing but watched as the frozen corpses blew in the gusting wind. He lowered the rifle scope. Erin was silent beside him. He tucked the scope back into his pocket and, with his teeth, pulled the glove off his numb right hand. Jim reached out and turned Erin towards him, away from the view of the tree. She blinked once and looked up at him with red, watery eyes. He swiped his thumb gently across her cheek.

"Let's go back."

* * *

Her sister killed herself on a Saturday in September. Erin's mother discovered her body the next day. Phone calls were made and Jim picked up the phone Sunday afternoon after drying his hands, wet from doing the dishes.

_Jim, it's Ellen. Oh, hey, do you want to talk to Erin? No…something terrible has happened._

The phone weighed a thousand pounds in his hand. A wet clearing of the throat from the other end of the line. Jim said nothing for a while. He was about to ask again if she wanted to talk to Erin and then she was standing in front of him, smiling.

"Who's on the phone?" she asked and he panicked, beads of sweat instantly wept into existence on his brow, pooled in the creases of the palms of his hands. He gripped the phone tightly and ignored Erin, choosing instead to speak into the receiver.

"Um, she just walked in. We'll...uh, we'll call you back in a minute."

Erin's smile faltered and faded as he silently hung up the phone, bracing himself against the stove for the span of time it took him to draw a deep, steadying breath.

"Jim?"

"You…need to sit down, baby."

Her face lost its color and she went stock still for a single second before woodenly stepping over to their kitchen table, dragging a chair out, and setting herself heavily into it. She said nothing, her eyes already rimmed with red and beginning to brim with tears. Instinctual understanding of this moment. No explanation needed, a reaction already encoded within her, activated by Jim's faltering tone and his expression. The creases in his brow, the stiffness in his shoulders spoke to her, told her without specifics that she could expect the worse and would be richly rewarded for doing so.

"Your sister," Jim began before choking on a lump forming in his throat. He hated doing this to her but knew it needed to be done. He cleared his throat and started over.

"Your sister…she's gone, Erin. I'm so..." here he took a stuttering breath, "…so sorry, sweetheart."

"She's gone? What does that mean, Jim?" Erin's voice was disbelieving as tears tracked slowly down her cheeks as her face began to redden, a prelude to the storm that would follow.

"She's dead, Erin" Jim said as quietly, gently as he could. Erin's face crumbled in on itself as she started to sob and she quickly leaned forward, elbows on the tabletop, and buried her face in her hands. He was out of her chair and kneeling at her side in an instant, left hand methodically, soothingly stroking the gentle curve of her hunched and shaking shoulders, his right hand kneading her bicep, his soul aching to make her stop crying. Make everything alright. Repair that which is irreparable.

He said nothing but leaned his head forward until his lips were pressed to the silken curtain of her hair just over her ear. Soft, soothing sounds as he stared without focus over the top of her head, out the sliding glass doors into the small back yard. A gentle breeze turned fall leaves slowly, without purpose and muted through the glass came the dry shifting of the leaves. The hanging clock's pendulum continued its traversal, the click of each arc sounding quietly in the background of Erin's desperate sobs. He felt tears on his cheeks and his heart broke for her.

"How did she die?"

"We should call your mother. She's expecting us to call."

* * *

Jim hammered the last nail into the boards he placed over the final window and tucked the hammer into the pocket of his jeans. In the fading light, the wind blew clouds of snow around him like a sort of halo, catching the soft glow that came from the small slat of window pane he left for them to see out of. He cupped his hands and peered in through the gap between boards.

Erin sat on the couch staring into the embers glowing hotly within their hearth, chewing on the cuticle of her right thumb, her legs curled up beneath her. Jim had been thinking about Erin's sister since they started their walk back to the house. He knew that that was all she'd been thinking about as well. This happened whenever they came across folk dead by their own hand. They reminded her of her sister, her best friend, and she saw in their dried and shrunken faces a face so perfectly preserved in her mind, embalmed within a tomb of fond memories. A dozen Christmas Eves and birthdays and school dances. Girlish laughter, immaturity. Jim knew that, even with all that had happened to the world, she would feel the sharpness of that loss for the rest of her days.

He stepped off the edge of the front porch and circled around the house in the snow. He knocked the snow off of his boots and went inside.

* * *

At the wake, Erin froze halfway to her sister's casket and Jim had to stand there with his hand on her back, comforting her while she stood motionless.

"Hey. Hey. Calm down, just breathe, okay?"

"I don't want to do this, Jim. I _can't_ do this."

"I know. I know how you feel. But you have to do this. You didn't get to say goodbye to her and this is the only chance you'll have. You don't want to do this. No one wants to do this. Ever. But I know you and if you don't take this last moment to look at her and say goodbye, you'll never forgive yourself. You know this."

He felt her breathing even out and she nodded slightly then wordlessly stepped to the edge of the casket. To her credit, her steps faltered only once more.

The next day, after mass, they stood in the cemetery after she was interned and everyone had left, Erin rooted to her spot. The cemetery workers stood patiently, respectfully off to the side, smoking. Jim stood next to her and said nothing. It felt like he was more or less silent the past few days. He wondered if he was being comforting at all.

"It should be raining or something. It's too bright out for a funeral."

"Yeah," was his response. She reached for his hand without looking and gripped it tightly.

"Is it weird that I'm mad at her? Mostly I miss her and I wish she was here, of course, but I feel like…I don't know. I feel like she betrayed me by leaving me her and doing that to herself. And I'm mad at her for all of this. Is that weird or selfish or something?"

"No, I don't think so. I think it's actually probably pretty normal to be feeling that way. This is a really difficult thing to deal with. You may not think so, but you're being so strong, Erin. It's kind of amazing."

She said nothing but squeezed his hand harder and pressed her side into his, her head resting against him. Neither of them spoke for a few moments, and then:

"I'm glad you're here, Jim."

* * *

After they had eaten in front of the hearth and cleared away their dishes, Jim went up to the corner bedroom overlooking the roadway in the direction of their camouflaged barricade and retrieved their blankets. He carried them back downstairs and arranged makeshift racks around the fire and hung the blankets there to warm them. He threw two more thick logs onto the glowing embers then sat next to Erin who, wrapped in a blanket, was slowly eating a jar of warmed apricots. Jim crawled beneath the warmth of her blanket and edged in against her. She had said very little all evening.

"Hi, fruit-having-lady. Can you spare some for a skinny Jim?" he asked, opening his mouth. She looked at him and gave up a small smile before carefully putting her spoon into his mouth.

"You're not _too_ skinny. Not like we both were. We were gross and I've never been happier to put on weight," she said softly as he chewed slowly, nodding thoughtfully, eyes staring unfocused at the fire. Eventually he turned back to her. She already had another spoonful waiting for him. He took it and when he was done he cleared his throat as he watched her eat.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm okay. I was just thinking about her."

"I figured you were. I was."

"Really?"

"Yeah," he admitted. "It's hard not to, seeing the way you react. Not that it's a bad thing. Reacting, I mean."

"I know what you meant," she said, finally smiling genuinely at his rush of words. Inwardly, he sighed in relief at her return. He was always worried until she came out of it. But she was back and in the dying light of the fire, he leaned across the space between them and kissed her, her mouth sugary and warm from the apricots. When he pulled away, the fireplace held nothing but quickly dimming embers. Erin unfurled her legs from beneath and her set the empty jar and spoon on the end table next to the couch. Wordlessly, they grabbed their warm blankets and carried them up the creaking staircase to their room. Jim set the wind up alarm clock to go off in two hours so he could check and make sure they were still secure in their little outpost and together they climbed beneath the layers of blankets.

Beyond the walls of their bedroom, the wind blew a high, piercing shriek that rattled the window panes in their molding and drowned out the sound of their deep and even breathing.

* * *

Jim was on his way down to his car to try and find the charger for his cell phone. He pushed the button for the elevator and shifted his feet, waiting. Through the door of the stairwell just down the hall, he heard something. Curiosity got the best of him and he decided that the elevator was taking too long, so he made his way over to the stairwell and quietly eased the door open, intent on finding out what he had heard. With the door open, it was obvious that the sounds that had drawn his attention were the sounds of someone crying inside the stairwell. He was about to retreat and wait for the elevator when he saw Erin standing tucked into the corner of the landing, arms crossed in front of her and her nose pressed to the cinderblock wall. Her eyes were screwed shut tightly and tear tracks glistened in the diffused light from the window. He stuck his hands in his pockets and made his way down to her.

She had heard his footsteps and by the time he reached the landing, she had opened her eyes and hastily scrubbed the tears from her face with the heels of her hands, managing to quiet herself so that when he stopped in front of her, her eyes were darting from the wall to Jim, her breath flaring her nostrils, but her crying had ceased.

"Are you okay?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"You don't look fine," he said simply, moving to lean against the wall next to her, but still keeping an arm's distance between them. After a while, she turned and looked at him.

"I don't want to talk about it. I'm sorry, Jim. Thank you for being so nice, but I just want to be by myself for a little while longer. Let the machine answer my calls," she said quietly, smiling slightly. He found himself looking back at her and returned the smile, nodding his head. Impulsively, he pushed off from the wall and took a step towards her. His arm rose and he placed his hand gently on her thin shoulder. She looked at him, surprised.

"Well, whatever it is…try not to let it bother you. Tears don't suit you, Hannon," he said. As he was about to withdraw his hand, she quickly raised hers to clasp tightly around his where it rested on her shoulder. His turn to be surprised.

"Thank you," she repeated and loosened her hand, letting his fingers slip through hers slowly as he withdrew. He said nothing and walked back upstairs to the office, where the phone at reception was ringing. Jim sat at his desk, hands dangling from the arms of his chair, remembering the feel of her small, warm fingers around his. He thought about that vulnerability and twice Pam called his name. He shook himself out of his trance and smiled up at her.

"I'm sorry, what?"

"I asked you what you wanted to do for lunch today. And hey," she said, pointing, "did you know your cell phone's dead?"

* * *

He awoke before the alarm sounded a second time. No reason for the awakening, just a feeling, like the press of the air right before a thunderstorm. His heart rate sped up and his body tensed. Erin stirred next to him.

The wind had died down in the night and no longer whistled around the eaves, but there was something else, a vibration of some sort. Erin jerked awake next to him.

"Jim?" she whispered, "Jim? What's going on? Do you feel that?"

"I don't know," he whispered beside her. They waited another beat until they heard a sound rise above the sound or sensation or whatever they were experiencing that pulled them from sleep. Though it was muffled by distance, the sound was something that both of them instantly recognized. It was the sound of a human voice shouting, though they could make out no words, as muffled as it was by the snow, trees, and distance from the house. It could only be coming from the road.

Jim bolted up from the bed and Erin sat upright, reaching for the pistol on her nightstand. Jim grabbed up the rifle and checked its load. With panic seizing his nervous system, he crossed to the window and peeked through the heavy blackout curtains they had hung.

"Oh my God. Oh my God," he said quietly, disbelief evident in every word.

"What is it? _What is it?_ You're scaring me, Jim."

"Come look. Oh, Jesus Christ, come look," he whispered, frantically waving her over. Her long legs gracefully touched the floor and within seconds, she was at his side, peering into the distance.

The air above the tree line was aglow with light, an orange smear that danced like a wildfire or maybe torchlight. Through the occasional small gap in the thick trees, they could see no movement but occasionally a flash of orange light. Small tendrils of smoke curled through the flickering glow into the dark and starless sky.

"Holy shit," Erin whispered breathlessly. Jim fumbled for the lock on the window and, with effort, lifted the frozen window an inch. Immediately, the room chilled as the frigid night air rushed in. They both dropped to their knees, peering through the gap and barely feeling the cold. They could hear dozens and dozens of voices shouting but could still make out no words. Underneath that, they heard what they eventually figured out was the sound of many feet packing down the snow as the unseen crowd moved.

"What are we going to do? Are they camped out there?" Erin asked. Jim knew her heart was pounding and this only because his felt like his was going to beat through his chest. He struggled to form a coherent thought and respond to her questions. His brain had completely locked up. Beside him, Erin began to fidget with impatience.

"We can't make a run for it. There's nowhere to go, it's too cold, and we might not be able to outpace them in the snow."

"Okay. So what do we do? Hide somewhere?"

"Where could we hide where they wouldn't find us?"

"_Then what do we do, Jim?_" her voice was frantic. Jim wracked his brain trying to come up with some sort of solution. Suddenly, he remembered the closet in the other bedroom. The ceiling of the four-foot-square space lifted up on hinges revealing a tiny, empty attic space. They had found it their second day at the house when they had searched the place top to bottom. It was such a small space that they had forgotten about it since then, having no use for it.

"The attic. They can smoke us out of they decide to set the place on fire, but it's the best we can do. Get your shit, get the guns. I'll head downstairs and grab whatever I can," he said, rushing from the room without waiting for her reply. Downstairs, he grabbed as many boxes of food as he could carry and rushed back up the stairs and into the second bedroom, dropping it on the floor where Erin had piled their guns.

"Good. Grab the blankets and the packs. I'll be right back," he said before leaving to head back downstairs. Two more trips later and he was standing on a desk chair in the closet shoving boxes up into the crowded space. Erin handed up the blankets, their small medical bag, and their vests, still heavy with spare ammunition. Next went their packs and then finally, gingerly, their weapons. It had taken fifteen minutes total from the time he had first sprinted for the stairs. Despite the chill in the house, sweat beaded on his forehead. He made room for Erin on the chair.

"You're next."

She quickly stood on the chair with him and stepped into his cupped hands and he pushed her up through the ceiling. She reached back down to help him up but he shook his head.

"Give me my vest and one of the rifles."

"_Fuck you_, you're coming up into this attic right _now_."

"Erin, there's no time to argue..."

"Get the fuck up here, Jim," Erin warned, her voice harsh and on the verge of a shout. Jim quickly pulled himself up into the crowded space with her. He cupped her face in his hands.

"I'm just going to keep watch. I have to keep you safe, Erin. It's my job to keep you safe. If they start coming, I'll come right up into the attic and we'll hide together. But you have to let me stand watch. We need to know, okay?"

Her face was a study in warring with oneself over an impossible decision, but she eventually relented and handed him a vest, which he dropped down through the hole. She kissed him lingeringly.

"As soon as you see someone, come straight here," she said.

"No place I'd rather be. I love you…I love you," he said, brushed a hand across her cheek quickly before dropping back down through the ceiling. She handed him a rifle and his .45 and they locked eyes for a few seconds before she dropped the hinged panel back in place.

When Jim saw that the panel was closed, he removed the desk chair from the closet and shut the door. After tucking the chair back beneath the desk where it belonged, he headed into their freezing and vacant bedroom and carefully shut the window. With his heart still beating wildly, he stood shrouded in their curtains and peering out the window at the foreign glow just beyond their clearing. He couldn't be sure, but he thought that maybe the light had shifted further up the road. Hours passed as he stood sentry and just before the first tendrils of dawn pierced the horizon, the light disappeared completely from sight and after an hour of watching the sun slowly rise, he stepped from beneath the curtain on aching legs and made his way to the closet, calling up to Erin. Without the use of the chair, he managed to pass his things to Erin and hoist himself up into the attic where, exhausted, he tunneled beneath the mounds of blankets with Erin and fell asleep in that crowded, dark place beneath the roof's peak.

* * *

_Review, won't you?_


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